FIND THAT PHONE
Cellphones that use GPS satellite signals to give users access to location-based services will be cheaper and far less power-hungry in future, according to CEVA, a firm in San Jose, California.
The company's software engineers have developed "XpertGPS", a program that can allow phones to decode GPS signals via the same digital signal processing (DSP) chip that phones already use to convert analogue voice signals into digital form for transmission over the network. It only costs around $3 per phone, whereas separate GPS decoder chips currently add around $40 to a phone's cost.
XpertGPS works by breaking GPS signals into chunks that the cellphone's DSP chip can process in parallel. This also means it processes the data four times faster than dedicated GPS chips - and uses a lot less power doing so, says spokesman Barry Nolan.
The software has been licensed to major phone chip makers, ...
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