Let’s face it – when it comes to GPS receivers, size matters. Talk to anyone in the GPS space, and they’ll tell you the next big growth area for GPS is cell phones. Epson, the company you probably already associate with printers, is looking to get into the booming GPS sector. The company  claims to have manufactured the “world’s smallest” GPS chip. The module is specifically designed for application where smallness is key, such as cell phones. Measuring 7 x 6 x 1.28 millimeters, Epson’s teeny tiny GPS is already being massed produced and already found its way into NTT DoCoMo’s FOMA 903i series.  According to Epson’s marketing mumbo jumbo, the tiny size of the receiver has sacrificed nothing in performance. Epson is claiming “3GPP-compliant positioning modes (MS-Based, MS-Assisted and Autonomous).” Now if only they could make it so I can print up a sheet of these things using my old $79 Epson dot-matrix…

Looks like there’s finally going to be some competition to SiRF’s mighty StarIII chipset. More technical details available HERE