Comneon And Global Locate Announce Availability Of A Complete Assisted-GPS Hardware/Software System Solution For 3G Mobile Phones

location based services

Munich / San Jose, California – Privately held Global Locate Inc., a leader in Assisted-GPS products and services and Comneon, a leading supplier of protocol stack software for mobile communications, today announced the availability of protocol software stacks incorporating software support for Infineon Technologies’ Hammerhead chip, the world’s first single die CMOS GPS receiver. The Comneon software solution enables handset manufacturers to introduce handsets compatible with RRLP (Radio Resource Location Protocol), RRC (Radio Resource Control), and SUPL (Secure User Plane Location) standards for Assisted GPS (A-GPS) without any additional software development. The solution set provides comprehensive coverage of all modes of GPS operation for both E911 and LBS (location based services) applications. A-GPS overcomes the limitations of traditional GPS services. Standard GPS receivers must download data from GPS satellites. This often takes several minutes for a conventional GPS receiver to download the required data from the satellites before computing its own location. With A-GPS, the same data can be relayed via an A-GPS server within a matter of seconds. This dramatically improves the performance of the GPS receiver in the mobile phone.“GPS applications and services are becoming more attractive to handset manufacturers and mobile operators. One important enabler of this trend is the availability of devices that not only meet the handset designers’ size and power requirements - but are also able to pass strict regulatory stipulations such as the US E911 mandate and the Japanese mandate which specify the range of the positioning of mobile phones sending emergency calls. In this respect the combined Hardware/Software offering from Comneon and Global Locate is a step in the right direction,” said Patrick Connolly, GPS Analyst at IMS Research.Dr. Christian Mucke, Managing Director of Comneon noted, “Incorporating our leading edge A-GPS software into our 2G/3G protocol stack and pre-integrating it with the Infineon Hammerhead GPS IC significantly lowers design efforts and therefore offers a cost advantage for our customers. The solution is applicable to both control plane and user plane protocols in our GPRS/EDGE and UMTS protocol offerings.” “The Comneon stack has completed intensive Inter Operability Testing against A-GPS core network elements such as SMLC (Serving Mobile Location Centre) and SLP (SUPL Location Platform) with major manufacturers” noted Javier De Salas, Global Locate VP of Marketing and Business Development. “This is a significant time-to-market advantage. Handset manufacturers now save the effort and expense of designing and qualifying protocol software from the ground up.”About the Hammerhead ChipHammerhead is the world’s first single die CMOS GPS receiver. A product of the continuing partnership between Global Locate and Infineon Technologies, Hammerhead supports mobile station-assisted (MS-A), mobile station-based (MS-B), autonomous and enhanced tracking modes. Hammerhead provides the industry’s highest sensitivity for deep indoor signal tracking, full support for assisted and autonomous modes, and highly accurate navigation in the toughest signal environments. Hammerhead’s unique host-based software architecture minimizes device size and cost and allows protocol messaging to be incorporated directly into the GPS navigation software. Additional information is available on the following URL www.infineon.com/gps Friday, December 08, 2006