One of several start-ups trying to penetrate the booming GPS market, San Jose, California-based Global Locate has distinguished itself by winning leading personal navigation device vendor TomTom as a customer and engaging in a long-running patent spat with GPS chipset market leader Sirf Technologies.
Irvine, California-based Broadcom justified the purchase price by quoting researchers at Forward Concepts as forecasting that the GPS chip sales will grow into a $1.07bn annual market by 2012.
Robert Rango, SVP of Broadcom’s Wireless Connectivity Group said that as a result of the acquisition, Broadcom will be the only semiconductor supplier with top-tier customers in Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, FM radio, and GPS, four of the key technologies being added to next-generation mobile phones.
Global Locate, which was founded in 1999, is currently producing its third generation of GPS chips. It said that competitors’ products consist of two separate chips for baseband and radio, but it has integrated both into a single-chip CMOS product. It said its Hammerhead single-die receiver has a tiny 3.5mm x 3.7mm x 0.6 mm footprint.
Broadcom will pay $146m up front for Global Locate and $80m on the achievement of certain performance goals.
Our View
A company so focused on the mobile device market as Broadcom was bound to buy a GPS chip vendor, and with TomTom as a customer, Global Locate is the most impressive of a number of start-ups. However, the technology is developing rapidly. Global Locate may have a tiny footprint but it will soon face competition from Bluetooth market leader CSR, which will offer no additional footprint by running software-based GPS systems on existing Bluetooth silicon. It will, in addition, offer triangulation as well as GPS to overcome the delay in getting GPS fixes in urban surroundings.
The good news is that a company with Broadcom’s clout will assist in reducing prices, which will enable GPS to move from the top end to mass-market phones.
