Kanwar Chadha's heart jumps when he goes to the park with his kids.
"I have a five-year-old and a three-year-old. Every time you go to a park, you're paying attention to one and the other one walks off," he says.
What if one walks away and gets lost? What about kidnapping?
Chadha has come up with a solution: put a homing device in their watch.
That's exactly what Chadha and Sirf Technologies, the company he founded, are trying to develop.
Since 1980, 24 military satellites have been used to pinpoint the location of missiles, warships, fighter planes, and anything else that the military could affix with a special receiver.
It's also been available for commercial use, and some interesting applications have opened up for the average consumer. Instant roadmaps on your car's dashboard are an example.
Now, in a breakthrough, Chadha's firm has pulled GPS off of your dashboard and put it on your fingertip: a prototype of a GPS receiver the size of a postage stamp.
In a year, he predicts, you'll be able to buy a necklace for your daughter that will keep you informed of her location. That is, if you can get her to wear it.
But Chadha shrugs off privacy concerns. He says that the receivers can be designed to transmit location information only when the user -- the one with the special necklace -- wants it to.
The chip, which will be sold in bulk for about $30 each, has been four years in the making.
Technology analysts see applications for the chip that are less directly intrusive. A button on your cellular phone could send off precise coordinates of your location in the event of an emergency.
And GPS-friendly concierge services could sprout, offering directions to the nearest crepe stand to an American in Paris.
According to Callie Pottorf, a researcher with technology analysis firm IDF, chip size will be an important factor as GPS-based products are developed.
Power will also be key.
"It can't run down the battery," Pottorf said.
Chadha plans to keep power at a minimum by having the receiver stay in sleep mode until it is activated. A GPS-chip on a cellular phone could "sleep" until a special button was pushed during an emergency, he said.
Chadha is no stranger to small chips. He was the product line manager for Intel's microprocessers from 1983-1989. He went on to work at S3, a video chip maker, and even started a multimedia graphics firm.
But the start-up went out of business.
"We were probably a year or two ahead of the market," he said. "At the bleeding edge, instead of the leading edge."
Now, however, Chadha is confident that the market is perfectly ready for his new chip.
"I think the market is going to be millions of units," he said. And if it can help keep track of your kids, he says, "Five seconds of anxiety is worth spending some dollars."
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