Up until a year or so ago, pretty much every GPS navigator out there was built around one of the most popular and versatile platforms ever, SiRF's Star III. However, things haven't been exactly great for the manufacturer lately, and in order to overcome its problems and restore the manufacturers' utmost confidence in its products, SiRF has just announced a whole new, revamped GPS platform, the SiRFatlasIV.

The SiRFatlasIV solution is a high-sensitivity, 64-channel, multi-satellite system location engine, with more than 1,000,000 correlators capable of improving time to first fix (TTFF) in tough environments, and providing true -161-dBm simultaneous tracking of both GPS and Galileo satellites. Also, due to its intelligent sharing of system memory, the location engine is able to use the available system resources in order to improve tracking accuracy and navigation and further reduce cost.

Given the fact that consumers are increasingly demanding faster route calculations, rich multimedia support, and a richer visualization experience, the SiRFatlasIV provides a 500-MHz ARM11 processor core with vector floating point unit complimented by a 64-bit system bus and an advanced, high-speed memory controller with DDR 400/Mobile-DDR 333 memory module. According to the company's statement, the built-in hardware video post processing accelerator handles video rendering and display, allowing popular mobile digital TV applications such as TDMB, DVB-H and CMMB to run with minimal impact on CPU performance.

Plus, the integrated NAND and SD controller design supports both single and multi-layer cell (SLC/MLC) flash memory, allowing system designers greater flexibility in selecting either a low cost or a robust NAND product. And by providing a full complement of embedded components and peripherals – including GPS/Galileo baseband, LCD touch-screen controller, 10-bit ADC, video input and high-speed USB 2.0 PHY – the SiRFatlasIV platform enables manufacturers to achieve extremely low overall system cost.

Apparently, the new platform from SiRF is already available in certain PND models out there, including here Navigon's 3300 max, 3310 max, 4310 max and 4350 max, Nextar's Q4-MD and YF International's model 82A, so you can check out their behavior if you're curious about what the fresh platform can do.


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