SiRF InstantFixII cuts PND start-up wait time

SiRF Technology Holdings has introduced SiRFInstantFixII, an autonomous version of SiRF's SiRFInstantFix technology designed to reduce start-up times for portable navigation devices (PNDs) from more than half a minute to as little as five seconds. The technology is available now for SiRFstarIII GPS receivers and SiRFatlas and SiRFtitan multifunction SoC navigation processors.

Kanwar Chadha, founder and vice president of marketing for SiRF Technology, says patent-pending algorithms enable PNDs to model the behavior of visible GPS satellites during the day and predict their position in the sky for up to three days in the future. SiRFInstantFixII continuously refines its calculations based on the latest data it receives from the satellites being tracked every time the PND is used. SiRFInstantFixII performs the calculations autonomously, without updates from a network.