NXP and Skymeter Cooperate to Develop Solution for Road Pricing

NXP Semiconductors and Skymeter have signed a memorandum of understanding to combine the two companies' latest solutions to offer superior road use metering technology for road user charging (RUC) and other automotive-related mobile payment markets.

This collaboration will provide the RUC market with GPS-based vehicle positioning unlike anything on the market today. It will easily comply with cross-border interoperability requirements such as the European Electronic Tolling System (EETS) directive in upcoming projects in the Netherlands, France, elsewhere in Europe and the rest of the world. The cooperation will be based on NXP's Automotive Telematics On-board unit Platform (ATOP) chipset and Skymeter's GNSS-based Time, Distance & Place Billing Data applications and services.

Skymeter's CTO Preet Khalsa says, "Until now we have found only two GPS chipsets designed to support our liability-critical process for financial-grade GPS applications needed for road pricing. NXP's technology will undoubtedly enhance our current technical offering, but will also provide state-of-the-art advances in a way that will lower our expense and our requirement for power and space - the two most valuable commodities in the telematics industry."

"NXP is the front runner in road user charging solutions. Our ATOP solution is part of the first practical test of road user charging in the Netherlands. We are impressed with Skymeter's GPS position reliability in the most difficult of environments and are very excited to collaborate with Skymeter to showcase the ATOP platform in such a rigorous application," says Frank Daems, director of business development, NXP Semiconductors. "We are also impressed that Skymeter's service architecture provides both technical and policy-based offerings that can be customized to virtually any road pricing need. The ability to jointly offer a variety of privacy-sensitive value-added services and solutions using Financial Grade GPS is a key advantage for the road pricing market, which ATOP is targeted for."

NXP's ATOP solution enables single component 'stand alone' On-Board Units (OBUs) dedicated to certified or authenticated services and applications such as stolen vehicle tracking, e-call and road pricing. It can also be used as a front end in more advanced open service telematics platforms, containing a variety of services including pay-as-you-drive, e-Horizon, Eco-Navigation and location-based mobility services.

About NXP Semiconductors

NXP is a leading semiconductor company founded by Philips more than 50 years ago. Headquartered in Europe, the company has about 29,000 employees working in more than 30 countries and posted sales of USD 5.4 billion (including the Mobile & Personal business) in 2008. NXP creates semiconductors, system solutions and software that deliver better sensory experiences in TVs, set-top boxes, identification applications, mobile phones, cars and a wide range of other electronic devices. News from NXP is located at www.nxp.com.

Skymeter Corporation is a Toronto, Canada-based data services operator that enables location-based payments using financial-grade GPS telematics. Its billing-data services include Time, Distance and Place (TDP) metering for road use, parking and PAYD insurance. It can also manage driver reward and credit systems. These services incorporate methodologies for both privacy and anonymity to ensure motorists enjoy complete privacy while traveling and absolute confidentiality of their trips. This is equivalent to an anonymous, in-car cell-phone that automatically pays for all these services based on actual usage. Skymeter enables every form of road-use charging from small city areas such as London (UK), and Stockholm's cordon charges up to metering every vehicle in a state, province or country in order to replace fuel taxes.