GPS on the go

and

today announced the 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. The single-die chip measures 3.74mm x 3.59mm x 0.6mm, for a total footprint of less than 14mm, 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 utilises 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 50mm. 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 said to deliver sensitivity to -160dBm and position fix times as fast as one second, exceeding 3GPP specifications. In addition, the software has been optimised for personal navigation performance, and includes sophisticated algorithms to mitigate multipath errors.