Global Locate, Inc. — San Jose, California (3190 S. Bascom Ave.). Founded 1999 per company profiles (founder Scott Pomerantz has described founding it in 2000); it had offices in the New York metro area, Tokyo, Taipei and Madrid. It was privately held, backed by roughly $45–62M in venture funding (Third Point Ventures, Firsthand, Motorola among investors), until Broadcom Corporation (then NASDAQ: BRCM) acquired it in July 2007 for about $146M in cash plus up to $80M in performance-based payments. Reliable headcount data is not available; it is best characterized as a small fabless design company that was folded into Broadcom's wireless connectivity group. It is not a standalone entity today.
Products / operations. Global Locate was a fabless developer of GPS and assisted-GPS (A-GPS) semiconductors, software and network services for handsets, smartphones, personal navigation devices and carriers. Its product suite included Hammerhead and Hammerhead II, described as the first commercial single-die CMOS GPS receivers integrating RF and baseband (co-developed with Infineon), plus IndoorGPS baseband/front-end ICs and SiP parts; host-based driver software and protocol stacks (SUPL, RRLP); and an A-GPS server built on its Worldwide Reference Network (WWRN), which supplied assistance data and patented Long-Term Orbit (LTO) multi-day ephemeris. Reported design wins included TomTom, and later profiles credit it with early GPS chip supply to Apple and Samsung handsets. It held more than 160–175 U.S. and foreign patents issued or pending on GPS/A-GPS.
Litigation posture. Operating company and two-way litigant, not an NPE: 3 appearances as defendant and 1 as plaintiff, all against rival chipmaker SiRF Technology. Venues were the Central District of California (Santa Ana) and the ITC — no Eastern District of Texas activity.
Notable cases. SiRF sued Global Locate in C.D. Cal. on December 15, 2006 and later filed an ITC §337 complaint naming it as respondent. Global Locate counterclaimed in January 2007 and filed its own ITC complaint on April 2, 2007, instituted as Inv. No. 337-TA-602 (Certain GPS Devices and Products Containing Same) against SiRF, Pharos, MiTAC, Mio and E-TEN on six patents. Broadcom was substituted as complainant after the acquisition; the January 2009 final determination found a violation and issued a limited exclusion order and cease-and-desist orders, while SiRF's claims against Global Locate were rejected. The dispute continued via Broadcom until it settled with CSR plc, which had acquired SiRF in 2009.