SiRF
Encyclopedia
SiRF Technology, Inc. was pioneer in the commercial use of GPS for consumer applications, the company was founded in 1995 and has its headquarters in San Jose, California
San Jose, California
San Jose is the third-largest city in California, the tenth-largest in the U.S., and the county seat of Santa Clara County which is located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay...

. The company was acquired by CSR plc
CSR plc
CSR , or Cambridge Silicon Radio, is a company based in Cambridge, England. CSR is a fabless semiconductor company whose main product lines include connectivity, audio and location chips. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index...

 in 2009. SiRF manufactures a range of patented GPS chipsets and software for consumer navigation devices and systems. The chips are based on ARM
ARM architecture
ARM is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by ARM Holdings. It was named the Advanced RISC Machine, and before that, the Acorn RISC Machine. The ARM architecture is the most widely used 32-bit ISA in numbers produced...

 controllers integrated with low-noise radio receivers to decode GPS signals at very low signal levels (typically -160dBm
DBm
dBm is an abbreviation for the power ratio in decibels of the measured power referenced to one milliwatt . It is used in radio, microwave and fiber optic networks as a convenient measure of absolute power because of its capability to express both very large and very small values in a short form...

). SiRF chips also support SBAS to allow for differentially corrected positions.

SiRFstarIII

SiRFstarIII architecture is designed to be useful in wireless and handheld location-based services (LBS) applications, for 2G, 2.5G, 3G asynchronous networks. The SiRFstarIII family comprises the GRF3w RF IC, the GSP3f digital section, and the GSW3 software that is API compatible with GSW2 and SiRFLoc. The chips have been adopted by major GPS manufacturers, including Sony, Garmin, TomTom and Magellan.

SiRFatLas IV

SiRFatLas IV is a multifunction location system processor and is meant for entry-level Personal Navigation Devices (PNDs). The SiRFatLas IV is a cheaper version of the very popular, but rather expensive SiRFPrima platform. Has GPS/Galileo baseband, LCD touch-screen controller, video input, 10-bit ADC and a high-speed USB 2.0.

Acquired by CSR

On 10 February 2009, UK wireless chip company CSR
CSR plc
CSR , or Cambridge Silicon Radio, is a company based in Cambridge, England. CSR is a fabless semiconductor company whose main product lines include connectivity, audio and location chips. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index...

announced it was buying SiRF in a share deal worth $136 million .
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