LONDON — GloNav Inc., a developer of baseband and RF chips for global positioning by satellite (GPS) applications, is planning to integrate its baseband and RF chips.

GloNav, a fabless chip company, was formed by the spinout of the GPS business of Ceva Inc. and the acquisition of RFDomus Inc. enabled by $16.2 million of capital from Atlantic Bridge Ventures (Dublin, Ireland). As a result it has engineering teams in Daventry, England, Dublin and Newport Beach, California. The fabless chip, although operationally headquartered in Newport Beach, California, has its legal and financial headquarters in Dublin.

GloNav has two products in the market, the GNR1040 RF IC and the GNS4540, which the company describes as a single-chip "assisted" GPS system.

However, Kevin Strong, vice president of marketing, said that the GNS4540 is two ICs brought together in a single package. The baseband IC is made using a 90-nanometer low power CMOS process from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. while the RF IC is made using a 0.18-micron silicon-germanium process from Jazz Semiconductor, a subsidiary of Jazz Technologies Inc. (Newport Beach, Calif.).

"We have an SOC integration strategy," Strong said but declined to outline it. Strong said the primary advantage of its GPS chips were their low power consumption which he said was lower than that of chips from Sirf, Qualcomm and TI.

Strong added that moves to include GPS in cell phones as a matter of course was proving disruptive in the market place with some companies choosing to adopt the "Qualcomm way" of integrating the basebands and the RF chips separately. The alternative strategy is to integrate cell phone functions in one chip and to integrate peripheral functions, specifically GPS, with Bluetooth and WiFi functions.

Strong said GloNav has its chips already designed into 10 phone models in China – some intended for domestic use, some for export.

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