SiRF Technology announced last week SiRFInstantFix, a service that will reduce the start up time of GPS systems.
Addressing the number one barrier to instant-on consumer GPS navigation systems, SiRF Technology Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: SIRF), a leading provider of GPS-enabled silicon and premium software location platforms, today introduced SiRFInstantFix, a unique service that minimizes the start-up wait time for GPS systems. SiRFInstantFix provides consumers with the ability to turn on their SiRF-based navigation devices and achieve the first fix in as fast as eight seconds to begin navigating faster than ever before, even through urban canyons, under dense foliage and in other weak-signal conditions.
SiRFInstantFix eliminates the initial time-consuming task of obtaining precise GPS satellite location data – ephemerides – from the satellites themselves. Instead, the SiRFInstantFix server uses a sophisticated set of proprietary algorithms to predict seven days of ephemerides and distills them down to a small file which SiRF-based navigation systems can use to pinpoint every GPS satellite. Using SiRFInstantFix, today’s high-performance GPS receivers can not only start tracking satellites and navigating more quickly, they can do it using signals much weaker than those needed to obtain ephemeris data the traditional way, removing the barrier that often stands in the way of successfully navigating under very weak signal conditions.
