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The rising popularity of location aware services will enable GPS chips to buck the downward trend in the semiconductor market, according to forecasts from IMS, which is looking for growth of $200m in the sector in the course of 2009.

"In 2009 GPS will begin to penetrate into a range of vertical markets, such as cameras, laptops, sporting equipment and first responder radios. This will help to drive shipment growth of over 25% year-on-year," writes analyst Tom Arran. He expects to see compound annual growth rate of 21.2% for GPS chips between 2008 and 2013.

This will be driven by a host of new applications that take advantage of location awareness and tie this into social networking, vertical and industrial apps and conventional mapping/local search systems. In some territories, it will be stimulated further by operators' agreeing to open up GPS data to third parties, as Verizon Wireless and Sprint have done. This will make more powerful mobile applications that can leverage the huge amount of presence and location data in operators' networks.

There are still challenges for the GPS market, though. Notably, it needs to improve performance in challenging environments, warns Arran, before chipmakers break the 500m units per year barrier. In these situations, many systems vendors may look to use multiple location technologies at once, including GPS, Wi-Fi and cellular triangulation.

Qualcomm and Broadcom are locked in an intense tussle for the mobile GPS chip crown, as well as numerous specialists.

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