Chip Startup Claims Advance in GPS Power Consumption

January 24, 2008

U.K. chip startup Air Semiconductor's GPS technology only requires as little as 1 percent of the power required by current GPS chipsets on the market, the company says.

The company today introduced its first product, the Airwave-1 chip and its core technology, which it says can continuously track a user's location and consequently provide instant location updates, all with negligible power drain. It is this constant tracking that is its key to lower power consumption, according to Air; the Airwave-1 consumes only 1mA when continuously tracking.

By continuously tracking location, Airwave-1 eliminates time-to-first-fix issues, the company says. It uses an adaptive technology which maintains a constant watch on its location but can almost instantly focus to provide a pin-point fix, Air claims. The single-chip contains all RF and digital hardware and the software needed to calculate location data. It outputs location data in a format that enables simple integration into consumer devices, according to the company.

Air Semiconductor has its corporate eye on digital cameras for its first market application; it says it is already in discussions with several digital camera manufacturers. It notes that in online communities such as Google Earth and Flickr some 2 million images a month are already geotagged manually. There is a also a commercial opportunity in mobile handsets for proactive location-based services, Air says.

"Air's technology is very novel, but because the result is so compelling and so easy to understand I am not surprised by the positive response we are receiving from camera manufacturers," said Stephen Graham, Air co-founder and CEO. "Continuous location in battery operated devices is a breakthrough with wide-reaching implications; digital cameras is just the tip of the iceberg."

Air Semiconductor co-founders David Tester and Graham and their team have spent the last 18 months developing the new proprietary technology. The company is currently backed by Pond Venture Partners.

"Pond has invested in Air as we see a combination of groundbreaking, next generation technology, a large potential market and a superb team,"said Mike Gera, a Pond general partner. "The team blends David's technical expertise, Stephen's commercial and marketing know-how with the first-class skills possessed by the rest of the team. At Pond, we see this as a winning combination that we are prepared to back strongly."

Samples of the Airwave-1 will be available in the summer of 2008, the Air says.

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