Going Mainstream - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 141

two years found a way to cut it significantly, enhancing gps suitability for mobile
devices. 140 In what one industry analyst called “a huge coup” for the three-
year-old company, on August 10, 1998, SiRF announced deals with wireless
market leader Nokia, phone maker Ericsson of Sweden, and the American
division of Japanese microelectronics giant Hitachi. 141 Nokia invested $3 mil-
lion in the company, while Ericsson and Hitachi licensed SiRF's technology. 142
SiRF became for a time the largest supplier of gps chips for computers, pnds,
and cell phones. Other competitors joined the action, targeting what became
a $270 million market for gps integrated circuits by 2000, forecast at the time
to grow to $1.2 billion by 2005. 143 Qualcomm, a San Diego-based phone maker
that was shifting its focus to wireless semiconductors, purchased SnapTrack,
a SiRF rival, in January 2000 for $1 billion in stock and within a few years
became a serious challenger to Nokia in the worldwide market for wireless
chips. 144 SnapTrack developed a hybrid location method that combined gps
in the handset with proprietary software in network computer servers. Other
companies, including SiRF, Motorola, and Global Locate, developed variants
of this “assisted gps” approach in which wireless network servers send signals
to the phone that compensate for weak or lost gps signals indoors. 145
The expansion of the privately held Global Locate illustrates how smaller
gps developers could rapidly grow through licensing. In 2004 Global Locate
licensed its gps chip technology to Infineon Technologies of Germany for a
small fee per chip, and over the next five years Infineon sold eighty million of
the chips worldwide, including those in the iPhone 3g. 146 As the gps semicon-
ductor industry matured, the integration of gps with other functions, such as
Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, on a single chip became the norm. 147 This precipitated
the larger dominant semiconductor players acquiring the gps- only chipmak-
ers. Broadcom, a diversified public company based in Irvine, California, with
a $15 billion market capitalization, bought Global Locate in 2007 for $226 mil-
lion. 148 UK-based Bluetooth maker csr bought SiRF in 2009 for $136 million. 149
By 2010 Broadcom overtook csr/SiRF as the leading gps chip supplier after
Apple chose its Global Locate-based chips (no longer licensed to Infineon) for
the iPhone 4 and iPad. 150 In 2012 Korean electronics giant Samsung, a major
Apple rival, bought csr's handset connectivity and gps semiconductor divi-
sion for $310 million. Today gps, used for both location and precise timing, is
literally at the heart of the integrated circuitry powering many consumer elec-
tronic devices, and the design and manufacture of gps chipsets is a strategic
battleground in the broader electronics industry. 151