NXP, Skymeter cooperate on road pricing

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

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 and place billing data applications and services.

Preet Khalsa, chief technology officer at Skymeter said, "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," said Frank Daems, director of business development, NXP. "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 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.