At the Computex trade show today in Taiwan, semiconductor manufacturer Broadcom announced a new system on a chip solution (SoC) dedicated to PND manufacturers.

The so-called “PND-on-a-chip” (BCM4760) embeds a global positioning system (GPS) baseband, radio frequency (RF) circuitry and low noise amplifier (LNA) as well as an ARM11 processor an OpenGL ES 1.1/OpenVG 1.0-compliant graphics processor. Designed in Broadcom's 65 nanometer (nm) process, the BCM4760 also integrates an audio codec, touch screen controller and USB 2.0 controller with high speed transceiver, all on a single die.

This new solution is currently sampling for early access customers.

Low- to high-end PNDs
The BCM4760 SoC enables system manufacturers to create PNDs at various price points and features.

For the entry-level market where low cost is the primary focus, the BCM4760 provides a USB 2.0 OTG high-speed controller with integrated transceiver, a 4- or 5-wire touch controller, and audio mixer with a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) to simplify the design and help shrink the PCB footprint while keeping the total bill-of-material (BOM) cost to a minimum.

For the mid-level market, the BCM4760 provides ample processing power for the rapid display of 3D city maps and 3D landmarks. It utilizes high performance 3-processor architecture, multiple high-speed interfaces, and Broadcom's connectivity technologies, such as Bluetooth and WLAN chipsets, can be connected directly to the BCM4760 platform. Other features, such as hands-free speakerphone, photo viewing and music playback, are also supported.

For the high-level market, the BCM4760 supports a direct connection to Broadcom's VideoCore family of mobile multimedia co-processors. Adding the VideoCore III co-processor for example, enables high definition (HD) video playback and recording, graphics acceleration, image signal processing (ISP), and more.