CSR debuts indoor location and navigation breakthrough with SiRFstarV architecture and SiRFusion platform

Locations & Beyond Summit, SAN FRANCISCO, USA: CSR Plc. provided a glimpse of the future of indoor location and navigation with a live demonstration of the new SiRFusion location platform and the SiRFstarV architecture, which are scheduled to become available next year.

Using a smartphone containing the first implementation of the SiRFstarV architecture, CSR showed summit attendees how this breakthrough self-learning SiRFusion platform “fuses” location information from multiple technologies to make extremely reliable and accurate indoor location and navigation a reality.

“The SiRFusion platform and SiRFstarV location architecture are the latest development to promote our vision of enhancing the mainstream consumer experience with a variety of location-enabled services and applications indoors and outdoors, seamlessly,” said Kanwar Chadha, chief marketing officer for CSR and founder of SiRF. “With today’s announcements, CSR is demonstrating its leadership in taking location to the next level with our SiRFusion platform and SiRFstarV architecture for mobile devices, as well as with our SiRFprimaII SoC for in-dash and on-dash automotive infotainment products.”

The SiRFstarV architecture introduces a new approach to location and navigation. Instead of relying solely on GPS to determine position, the SiRFstarV architecture gathers real-time information from GPS, Galileo, Glonass and Compass satellites, multiple radio systems, such as Wi-Fi and cellular, and multiple MEMS sensors, like accelerometers, gyros and compasses. It then combines this real-time information with ephemeris data, mapping, cellular base station and Wi-Fi access point location data and other cloud-based aiding information using the SiRFusion platform.

“Our customers are asking for location technology that can address the emerging needs of location-enabled applications, and indoor location and navigation are key to that,” said Ahmet Alpdemir, senior VP of the Mobile Business Area at CSR. “The SiRFstarV and SiRFusion platforms will enable our customers to differentiate their devices by delivering an enhanced experience to consumers and enterprises using location-enabled services.”

Thirty years ago, using satellite positioning technology required several minutes or more to provide a single outdoor position fix, which could vary by as much as a mile even when standing still. Today, highly accurate outdoor navigation with continuous updates once per second is commonplace. Similarly, until now, using Wi-Fi technology required several seconds to provide a single indoor position fix, which also had relatively low accuracy and a high degree of variability (jitter).

By combining real-time Wi-Fi and satellite positioning information, pedestrian dead reckoning (using MEMS sensors) and crowd sourced location and aiding data from a cloud-based server, SiRFusion technology is able to achieve the rapid and more accurate indoor position fixes needed to make continuous indoor navigation a part of everyday life.

“Unlike many other systems that require manual surveys to build and maintain an indoor Wi-Fi and cellular location database, the CSR Positioning Centre (CPC) cloud-based server is able to receive anonymous and voluntary location information wirelessly from users’ devices, even indoors, to improve the database,” said Dave Huntingford, director of Product Management for Mobile Business Area at CSR. “We have taken a fundamentally new approach to location and navigation that achieves a seamless transition between outdoor and indoor navigation by combining real-time and cloud-based location information from a multitude of sources and processing it right on the mobile device.”

The upcoming CSR SiRFstarV family of location chips, due out next year, will be the first CSR products to implement and utilise the SiRFusion platform.