Infineon, Global Locate develop smallest GPS receiver

MUNICH: Infineon Technologies AG and Global Locate, Inc. today announced the successful development of the industry’s smallest Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver chip for mobile telephones, smart phones and personal navigation devices.

Based on the successful Hammerhead chip, the new Hammerhead II chip is optimized for cellular handsets and mobile devices requiring high performance, low power and an extremely small footprint, Infineon and Global Locate said in a joint press statement.

The diminutive single-die chip measures only 3.74 mm x 3.59 mm x 0.6 mm, for a total footprint of less than 14 mm², resulting in the world’s smallest GPS receiver.

The Hammerhead II GPS receiver includes LNA, RF down-converter and signal processing baseband technology on a single RFCMOS die. The device utilizes chip scale packaging technology, resulting in the most compact dimensions. The package features a 49-contact Ball Grid Array, further simplifying layout and assembly.

“The GPS feature can now be added to any mobile device with a total electronics bill-of-materials footprint of less than 50 mm². The Hammerhead II chip has set a new standard for compact design,” said Thomas Pollakowski, vice president and general manager of the Connectivity Business Unit at Infineon Technologies.

“The Hammerhead II chip is the logical extension of our technical cooperation and outstanding partnership,” added Donald Fuchs, executive vice president of Business Development for Global Locate.

Like its predecessor, the Hammerhead II chip embodies industry-leading performance, delivering sensitivity to -160 dBm and position fix times as fast as 1 second, exceeding 3GPP specifications. In addition, the software has been optimized for personal navigation performance, and includes sophisticated algorithms to mitigate multipath errors.

Hammerhead II retains the same core advantages as all previous Global Locate solutions by utilizing the commercially proven host-based architecture. The software is completely backward-compatible with Hammerhead, allowing an easy transition to the new, smaller part as changing form-factors require.

The Hammerhead II chip is sampling now, with production quantities available in February 2007. Infineon and Global Locate are jointly marketing the chip.

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