May 29 2013
Broadcom Corporation, a global innovation leader in semiconductor solutions for wired and wireless communications, today announced that its Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) location chip with geofence capabilities — the BCM47521 — won a COMPUTEX 2013 Best Choice Award. For more news, visit Broadcom's Newsroom.
The BCM47521 is the industry's first GNSS chip with a unique architecture to enable geofence capabilities while preserving battery life. A geographical region of interest (aka "geofence") is being used by many new and innovative location-aware applications. The geofence feature enables the application to receive a notification when a user enters or exits a virtual perimeter. The implementation of this feature in traditional architectures has not been viable as the applications processor has needed to run constantly, causing rapid drain to the device's battery. Broadcom's new BCM47521 overcomes this issue, making it possible to continuously monitor geofence areas while consuming 60x less battery power.
"We're honored to be recognized by the Taipei Computer Association for our breakthrough GNSS technology," said Monika Gupta, Senior Director, Marketing, GPS. "Broadcom is committed to delivering integrated mobile and wireless innovations that provide our customers with virtually everything needed to bring advanced consumer electronics devices to market. By enabling the geofence capability to be active without draining the device's power, we're driving the next wave of innovation that will help make location-aware, always-on applications a reality."
The BCM47521 chip also provides advanced multi-constellation support by simultaneously collecting data from four satellite constellations (GPS, GLONASS, QZSS and SBAS) and using the best received signals, resulting in faster searches and more accurate real-time navigation. Broadcom's multi-constellation technology, coupled with advanced signal processing, provides faster positioning performance for improved user experience, especially in challenging urban environments where buildings and obstructions can dramatically impact accuracy and time-to-first-fix. Tight integration with sensors, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and NFC also enables ubiquitous positioning both indoors and outdoors.
The Best Choice Awards recognize the most innovative and distinctive products showcased at COMPUTEX. The award winners were announced during a ceremony in Taipei, Taiwan on May 28. For more information on the program, please visit http://www.computex.biz/bestchoice/AboutBC_en.aspx.