GPS technology has an Indian connection

Sanjai Kohli is the reason why we are able to use GPS (global navigation system) on our mobile phones and cars. And like his legendary father,F C Kohli who is referred to as the ‘father of the Indian software industry’, it might be fair to call the 53-yearold Sanjai Kohli the father of mass-market GPS technology. Kohli has been short-listed for the European Inventor Award (to be announced on April 28) instituted by the European Patent Office and the European Commission. He’s one out of the total of 12 shortlisted, and one among three in the category of inventors from non-European countries. Kohli said the origin of his interest in GPS lay in the work he did for the US defence sector in the 1980s. Soon after finishing his engineering degree from IIT, Mumbai, in 1979, Kohli went to the US to do his Masters, and then worked in a couple of aerospace companies. In one of these, he was assigned to put intelligence into bombs dropped from planes. At that point, 90% of bombs hit unintended targets. “So we worked on a guided GPS system. We pulled off a successful programme, and soon, all the US military weapons were based on that technology,” Kohli said. He then thought of commercializing the technology. In 1993, he was in Tokyo and found GPS being used in car navigation. But they frequently did not work inside cities with tall buildings because these obstructed the links to satellites. In order to limit this problem, the system makers linked the GPS with aids like gyros, accelerometer and odometer. “I realized then that there was a great opportunity in GPS devices if I could make them operate reliably in urban environments without external aids while making them smaller and cheaper. He set up a company called SiRF. The innovation we did was to reinvent the signal processing physics to let us reduce the cost and size, and increase power, resulting in tens of thousands of dollars of signal processing/communication equipment to reside in a single silicon chip. The chip was 200 times more capable than those used in the Japanese cars and was available at a fraction of the cost.” Toyota signed a contract with SiRF. And the rest as they say is history. By 2006, 80% of GPS devices ran on SiRF chips. At its peak SiRF had a market capitalization of $3 billion.