Broadcom announced its first single-chip GPS receiver, a solution which promises to set new standards in terms of performance and power consumption. The BCM4750 is specially conceived for mobile devices and is expected to provide faster signal searches, accurate real-time navigation, improved tracking sensitivity and very low power consumption.

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 -162 dBm 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 other products fail to do so. 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 square millimeters of board space, including all of the necessary components for a typical cellular phone implementation.

The BCM4750 is ideally suited for personal navigation devices where rapid time-to-first-fix (TTFF) and superior navigation performance are required. In addition, products that include network connectivity, such as wireless personal navigation devices 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.

"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."