Company overview. SiRF Technology, Inc. was an American fabless semiconductor company founded in 1995 and headquartered in San Jose, California. Its publicly traded parent was SiRF Technology Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: SIRF). The company was acquired by UK-based CSR plc in a share deal announced February 2009 and valued at roughly $136 million; CSR itself was later acquired by Qualcomm in 2015. SiRF therefore no longer operates as an independent entity. Public sources describe it as a leading pure-play GPS chip supplier but do not give a reliable standalone employee or revenue figure for the periods in the case data.
Products / operations. SiRF pioneered commercial GPS for consumer applications, designing GPS chipsets, associated firmware/software and location platforms. Its flagship product architecture was SiRFstarIII, later joined by the SiRFstarIII-LT and GSD3t (90 nm RFCMOS) lines, the SiRFInstantFix software, the GSC3/LP family, and the multimode assisted-GPS GSCi-5000 chip. Chips paired ARM controllers with low-noise radio receivers for weak-signal GPS acquisition and supported SBAS. End markets included portable navigation devices, automotive telematics, mobile handsets, and other consumer electronics. Wafer fabrication, test, assembly and packaging were outsourced (TSMC, ASE). It was an operating company, not a patent assertion entity.
Litigation posture. The tracked docket shows an active two-way litigant — five cases as plaintiff, one as defendant — all clustering in 2006–2008 and all against the same adversary family, Global Locate, Inc. and its acquirer Broadcom. This is competitor-versus-competitor GPS patent litigation, not NPE activity. Venues include the Central District of California (Santa Ana Division), the ITC, and the Federal Circuit.
Notable cases. In December 2006 SiRF sued Global Locate in the Central District of California; in February 2007 it filed ITC complaint 337-TA-596 over GPS chips and software, asserting U.S. patents including 6,304,216, 7,043,363, 7,091,904 and 7,132,980. Global Locate counter-filed ITC 337-TA-602, which Broadcom joined after acquiring Global Locate in July 2007; that investigation ended in a January 2009 finding of violation by SiRF and issuance of a limited exclusion order and cease-and-desist orders. SiRF appealed to the Federal Circuit, and the related district court suits were stayed pending the ITC rulings.