01 December 2004

Auckland company Rakon continues to lead its market niche through an emphasis on research and development, and its speed to market with high quality products.

Rakon has beaten competitors in the development of an advanced chip suited especially for GPS applications. The new AK2128 chip has allowed Rakon to start manufacturing an advanced line of temperature-compensated crystal oscillators (TCXO) which are small, competitively priced and give exceptional performance, making it ideal for mass market cell phones and other GPS devices.

The chip meets the new US requirement E-911 mandate that all cellphones be able to report the location of the caller when calls are made.

Rakon Sales Manager Justin Maloney says while GPS has been entering cellular phones as part of the E-911 mandate, current positioning performance has been poor and not of a standard that allows network providers to charge for additional services, outside of emergency calls.

For the last six months Rakon has been producing more than one million of the new TCXOs with the chip each month. Rakon says the new product and its manufacturing technology puts it up to two years ahead of its competitors.

Because they have been able to release this product to the market ahead of competitors, Rakon has secured design wins with some of the world's largest manufacturers.

Rakon's customers include Motorola, Samsung, Nokia, Ericsson, Texas Instruments, Siemens, and Qualcomm.

Rakon expects TXCOs based on the new chip to account for more than 65% of its total volume output by the end of this year with sales forecast to reach more than 1.5 million units by December 2004.

For more information:
www.rakon.co.nz