GISIND.COM

In a bid to bring portable navigation to the cellular phone segment, Sirf Technologies launched on Tuesday two tiny power-efficient chipsets designed to integrate GPS capability and wireless connectivity into mobile handsets.

The company will showcase several of its new technologies next week at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

"All indications are that 2006 will be a big year for these types of devices because price points are becoming consumer-affordable," said Kanwar Chadha, founder and vice president of marketing for Sirf.

"Over the past few years GPS has started to hit the mainstream market – in the last year overall, we and our competitors sold more GPS chipsets than were sold in the previous five years," Chadha said.

Thin is in The company has added to its chipset offerings with the GSCi-5000, a stand-alone multimode Assisted GPS architecture, which offers mobile phone manufacturers accurate navigation capabilities that can be incorporated into existing platforms.

Sirf's previous GPS products have been designed around its SirfStar III technology, which has been used in GPS receivers like the TomTom TheRider. First introduced in Feb. 2004, the SirfstarIII architecture offers 20-channel all-in-view tracking, a measure of how fast the receiver can acquire and communicate with the GPS satellites.

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