CSR has made a major move into the market for GPS (global positioning system) technology with the acquisition of two firms - Cambridge Positioning Systems and NordNav Technologies. 

CSR has spent over $75m on the two firms and its aim is to integrate autonomous and assisted GPS product offerings into its own mobile comms technology with first products available as early as this summer.
 
"CSR’s acquired patented GPS solution is a software-based architecture that allows an incremental price that falls to less than $1 of the overall bill-of-materials when used with CSR’s Bluetooth technology," said CSR.

A key part of this will be the software GPS technology acquired from NordNav, which according to CSR, takes up "80 per cent less area than competing hardware solutions and is the lowest cost solution on the market, with a price that is set to fall to less than $1".

“At $5-$10, current GPS solutions are too expensive and just not practical for mainstream cellphone applications," said Matthew Phillips, senior v-p of CSR’s mobile handset business.

CSR has paid $35m for Cambridge Positioning Systems for its Extended GPS (EGPSTM) software algorithms for mobile handsets and network server software. The attraction of these algorithms is that they provide GPS coverage in dense urban areas and even indoors where there is no access to GPS satellite signals.

CSR’s GPS technology will also support the Galileo global standard.