Industry Expert Blogs

What is a software GPS, what does it have to do with Tensilica DSP IP, and why would anyone care? To answer that, let's start with a quiz from the transportation industry. How many shipping containers are currently in transit around the world? It turns out that no one knows for sure, but the best guess is that there are about 20 million containers in service today. And it's a safe bet that those containers are carrying hundreds of billions of dollars worth of cargo. With that much at stake, the shippers, ports, railroads and trucking firms do their best to keep track of them, typically using RFID tags. But while those tags can be tracked at a waypoint, a better solution would be to use a GPS-enabled active monitoring system to constantly report their location. In fact, a smart system could report its entire history: where it had been, the temperatures it experienced, whether it went by boat, train, or truck, and has it been dropped? That would be really valuable information! This is just one of many possible applications for GPS-enabled systems that will become more and more common as new types of devices emerge to populate the Internet of Things (IoT).

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