Catching the Wave: SiRF’s New Architecture Tackles GPSfor Consumer Products

Greg Turetzky, Leon Peng, Robert Tso and Jerry Knight

Abstract:	As the idea of location awareness begins to penetrate into consumer products, a new paradigm will be required to meet the exacting demands of mainstream consumers using GPS. This paper will introduce SiRF’s new SiRFstaräII architecture that combines SiRF’s powerful system and software techniques with the latest process technologies to optimize GPS for consumer products. The SiRFstarII architecture consists of a new RF IC and a new digital ASIC that combines a GPS digital signal processor with on-chip DGPS processors, a general purpose CPU, memory and peripherals to create a powerful platform for a variety of applications. The GPS digital signal processor improves SiRF’s industry leading fast acquisition performance with innovative hardware additions. Extensive levels of system integration simplify the system design by reducing the board space and power consumption. The ASIC is designed to QS-9000 quality standards. Using BiCMOS technology, the RF front-end chip has the highest functional integration in the industry, including an integrated IF filter, resulting in the smallest and lowest part count RF section available today. The SiRFstarII is supported by GPS software designed from the start to incorporate user tasks and provide maximum available throughput for the application software. The GPS tasks can be run in either a GPS-major mode where application tasks are scheduled from the GPS timing interrupts or in a GPS-minor mode where the GPS tasks are scheduled by the application software. All together, the SiRFstarII architecture allows a whole new set of consumer devices to be rapidly developed around a high performance, cost effective chip set. The architecture was also designed to be available simultaneously in Intellectual Property (IP) core form to enable easy integration of GPS into platforms such as cellular phones.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 12th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS 1999) September 14 - 17, 1999 Nashville, TN
Pages:	771 - 776
Cite this article:	Turetzky, Greg, Peng, Leon, Tso, Robert, Knight, Jerry, "Catching the Wave: SiRF’s New Architecture Tackles GPSfor Consumer Products," Proceedings of the 12th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS 1999), Nashville, TN, September 1999, pp. 771-776.
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