FORT WORTH, Texas, ION GNSS 2007, Sept. 25 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Broadcom Corporation (NASDAQ: BRCM), a global leader in semiconductors for wired and wireless communications, today announced its first single-chip global positioning system (GPS) solution, highlighting the company's successful integration of its Global Locate acquisition and its commitment to delivering the industry's best GPS technology. The GPS receiver sets new standards in performance and power consumption with state-of-the-art sensitivity and navigation performance, and less than half the power consumption of competitive solutions. The new Broadcom(R) chip and associated software will be demonstrated at this week's Institute of Navigation (ION) conference in Ft. Worth, Texas beginning tomorrow.
GPS technologies have become increasingly important with growing consumer interest in personal navigation devices (PNDs) and the strong desire by cellular service operators to add location-based services to their offerings. According to research from In-Stat, approximately 47 million PNDs and more than 436 million mobile phones with GPS technology will ship in 2010. As GPS chip solutions become more integrated and costs decline, the technology will expand into a whole new range of applications.
"As consumer use of location-based services grows, we are seeing an incredible amount of interest from our customers in the cellular and PND markets for GPS and assisted GPS technologies," said Scott Pomerantz, Vice President and General Manager of Broadcom's GPS line of business. "Broadcom has now established itself as a technology leader in the GPS chip market with a solution that provides the industry's best tracking sensitivity, lowest average power and most complete portfolio of software, complemented by the company's unique ability to integrate its GPS technology into other leading mobile chips and processors."
The Broadcom BCM4750 is produced in a low cost 90 nanometer CMOS process and features superior receiver technology and tracking sensitivity. The receiver makes full use of the Global Locate architecture, and can measure the faintest GPS signals deep indoors and in "urban canyon" environments at signal levels as low as -162 dBm. It also consumes less than 15 mW while navigating with one second map updates, less than half the power of competitive solutions according to published datasheets.
The BCM4750 is ideally suited for PNDs where rapid time-to-first-fix (TTFF) and superior navigation performance are required. In addition, products that include network connectivity, such as wireless PNDs and cellular phones, are able to exploit the full feature set of the BCM4750 software solution. These features include Assisted GPS (AGPS) and long-term orbit (LTO) extended ephemeris assistance, reducing TTFF to less than one second in many conditions. In all cases, Broadcom provides both the chip and the software including AGPS stacks and client software.
Broadcom also maintains a worldwide reference network with land-based GPS receivers located around the earth's equator, and carrier hardened servers to collect and provide AGPS and LTO data directly to GPS equipped cellular phones and wireless PNDs. Working hand-in-hand with the BCM4750 and Broadcom's client software, customer products are able to take full advantage of the benefits of AGPS and LTO. By providing this service along with the chip, Broadcom is able to offer OEMs s a one-stop-shop for all of their positioning technology needs.
BCM4750 Product Details
The BCM4750 is a single-die CMOS GPS receiver used for tracking and navigation, primarily in mobile devices. Its massive parallel hardware correlators provide faster signal searches, accurate real-time navigation, improved tracking sensitivity and very low average power consumption. With tracking sensitivity of -162 dBm, the BCM4750 sets a new benchmark for the industry.
Enhanced tracking sensitivity allows GPS-enabled mobile devices to detect very weak signals including those partially blocked or reflected by buildings or other structures. In these environments, GPS units sometimes fail to achieve a location "fix" or take a long time to do so. With the high sensitivity of the new BCM4750 GPS receiver chip, these initial location fixes occur much faster and in many cases, the BCM4750 can get a fix where competitors' products do not get a fix at all. The BCM4750 also integrates a number of external components, resulting in a very small footprint to design GPS into mobile devices. A complete GPS solution featuring the BCM4750 will use less than 35 mm2 of board space, including all of the necessary components for a typical cellular phone implementation.
BCM4750 Software
The BCM4750 includes software that is optimized for cellular integration and the demands of international standards bodies -- such as 3GPP and SUPL -- that promote high speed data in cellular systems. The software includes message handling protocols for user and control plane-assisted GPS standards, as well as native support for LTO extended ephemeris service. In addition, the software has been optimized for personal navigation performance and includes sophisticated algorithms to mitigate multipath errors.
About Broadcom Wireless Solutions
Broadcom is the only major chip supplier in the world with top-tier customers in Bluetooth(R), Wi-Fi(R), FM radio and GPS, four of the key wireless technologies featured in next generation mobile phones. As more consumers rely on wireless devices to stay connected, Broadcom is delivering the technologies that make those connections fast and reliable. With the industry's most comprehensive portfolio of wireless technologies, Broadcom provides a "future proof" path to wireless chips that combine GPS with other portfolio technologies, producing products that are lower cost and in smaller form factors.
About Broadcom
Broadcom Corporation is a major technology innovator and global leader in semiconductors for wired and wireless communications. Broadcom products enable the delivery of voice, video, data and multimedia to and throughout the home, the office and the mobile environment. We provide the industry's broadest portfolio of state-of-the-art, system-on-a-chip and software solutions to manufacturers of computing and networking equipment, digital entertainment and broadband access products, and mobile devices. These solutions support our core mission: Connecting everything(R).
Broadcom is one of the world's largest fabless semiconductor companies, with 2006 revenue of $3.67 billion, and holds over 2,200 U.S. and 900 foreign patents, more than 6,600 additional pending patent applications, and one of the broadest intellectual property portfolios addressing both wired and wireless transmission of voice, video and data. Broadcom is headquartered in Irvine, Calif., and has offices and research facilities in North America, Asia and Europe. Broadcom may be contacted at +1.949.926.5000 or at www.broadcom.com.
Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995:
All statements included or incorporated by reference in this release, other than statements or characterizations of historical fact, are forward- looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based on our current expectations, estimates and projections about our industry and business, management's beliefs, and certain assumptions made by us, all of which are subject to change. Forward-looking statements can often be identified by words such as "anticipates," "expects," "intends," "plans," "predicts," "believes," "seeks," "estimates," "may," "will," "should," "would," "could," "potential," "continue," "ongoing," similar expressions, and variations or negatives of these words. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future results and are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause our actual results to differ materially and adversely from those expressed in any forward-looking statement.
Important factors that may cause such a difference for Broadcom in connection with BCM4750 GPS products include, but are not limited to, general economic and political conditions and specific conditions in the markets we address, including the volatility in the technology sector and semiconductor industry, trends in the broadband communications markets in various geographic regions, including seasonality in sales of consumer products into which our products are incorporated, and possible disruption in commercial activities related to terrorist activity or armed conflict in the United States and other locations; the rate at which our present and future customers and end-users adopt Broadcom's technologies and products in the markets for global positioning system applications; delays in the adoption and acceptance of industry standards in those markets; the timing, rescheduling or cancellation of significant customer orders and our ability, as well as the ability of our customers, to manage inventory; the gain or loss of a key customer, design win or order; our ability to scale our operations in response to changes in demand for our existing products and services or demand for new products requested by our customers; our ability to specify, develop or acquire, complete, introduce, market and transition to volume production new products and technologies in a cost- effective and timely manner; intellectual property disputes and customer indemnification claims and other types of litigation risk; the quality of our products and any remediation costs; changes in our product or customer mix; the volume of our product sales and pricing concessions on volume sales; the effectiveness of our expense and product cost control and reduction efforts; our ability to timely and accurately predict market requirements and evolving industry standards and to identify opportunities in new markets; problems or delays that we may face in shifting our products to smaller geometry process technologies and in achieving higher levels of design integration; our ability to retain, recruit and hire key executives, technical personnel and other employees in the positions and numbers, with the experience and capabilities, and at the compensation levels needed to implement our business and product plans; the risks and uncertainties associated with our international operations; competitive pressures and other factors such as the qualification, availability and pricing of competing products and technologies and the resulting effects on sales and pricing of our products; the timing of customer-industry qualification and certification of our products and the risks of non-qualification or non-certification; the availability and pricing of third party semiconductor foundry, assembly and test capacity and raw materials; fluctuations in the manufacturing yields of our third party semiconductor foundries and other problems or delays in the fabrication, assembly, testing or delivery of our products; the risks of producing products with new suppliers and at new fabrication and assembly facilities; the effects of natural disasters, public health emergencies, international conflicts and other events beyond our control; the level of orders received that can be shipped in a fiscal quarter; and other factors.
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