Abstract
Anand Ramamoorthy
Senior Director
Freescale Semiconductor,
Email: [email protected]
Since the completion of the global positioning systems (GPS) satellite network in the early 1990’s, there has been a proliferation of applications developed utilizing this technology. While military and defense related applications ruled the roost in the heydays of GPS technology, the last few years have seen most of the applications in the consumer and commercial space. The introduction of products with high volume potential such as cell phone (referred to as ‘handset’ in the rest of this paper) have given GPS technology a definite niche in terms of market economics. The E-911 mandate stipulated by FCC (Federal Communications Commission, United States) requires every cellular phone to be able to provide their location to assist in dispatching emergency help. This initiative has fuelled the emergence of creative technologies that combine the use of GPS as well as wireless carrier networks to provide high accuracy and reliable position information. This technology is also referred to as A-GPS (Assisted GPS). The key to success in some of these challenging markets is low system cost, shorter development window coupled with a sound understand of the overall ‘system partioning’. Countries like India and China provide a great opportunity for mass GPS deployment in car navigation, fleet management and other location based applications. To make this a reality, there is a need for the entire technology ecosystem to develop and take shape. The most critical element in this ecosystem is the availability of high quality digital maps with dynamic content. This paper takes a close look at how semiconductor manufacturers in particular are using an ‘ecosystem approach’ to build vertically integrated platform solutions that will lead to robust system designs with shorter development time and faster time to production and revenue. The approach calls for an active collaboaration with almost everyone in the value chain spanning from the map and application developers at the top of the spectrum to the silicon vendor at the bottom of the foodchain.
