Car guidance system close

By CHRIS BARTON

Talon Technologies will be among the first companies in the world to use Intel's new Xscale chips for hand-held devices.

For the past 18 months, the North Shore-based manufacturer has been developing an in-car navigation device and is due to start production in July.

Talon's international sales and marketing manager, Nick Maire, said it would initially produce 5000 to 10,000 units of the Navman car navigator a month for the European and North American markets.

The pocket-sized unit comes with maps from TeleAtlas and provides route directions which are both shown onscreen and spoken to the driver.

Group leader for engineering Barry Gillard said Talon chose Intel's PXA250 chip for its performance and low battery-power consumption.

The chip also provided integrated graphics processing for the unit's colour screen, support for memory cards and a variety of communication ports, which helped keep production costs down.

Mr Gillard said the Navman would have been in production earlier but progress had been hampered by shortage of software engineers to build the navigation system's operating kernel.

Ten software engineers are now working on the project using Compaq iPaqs with Intel's earlier-version chip as a development platform.

The PXA250 and its less-powerful brother, the PXA210, are Intel's latest bid to gain a bigger share of the market in mobile phones and handheld computers.

Both Intel's XScale chip and Texas Instruments' OMap chip are built around a core technology developed by British company Arm Holdings. Intel has made chips based on Arm's StrongArm design foundations since it took over the chip operations of Digital Equipment in 1998.

StrongArm has become the chip of choice for companies such as Compaq and Hewlett-Packard, which make handheld computers using Microsoft's PocketPC operating system.

The new chip family, introduced last week, supplants StrongArm with Intel's own design features and is about twice as fast with two-thirds the power consumption.