STMicroelectronics and TomTom have collaborated to innovate geolocation-based tools and services by accelerating product development and reducing time-to-market and development costs for developers. A package of development tools in the STM32 Open Development Environment that connect directly to TomTom Maps Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for location, tracking, and mapping data services.

The package, which both companies said to be the first-of-its-kind-development package, consists of an STM32 Discovery host board for 2G/3G cellular-to-cloud connectivity, a GNSS expansion board based on ST's industry-proven Teseo satellite navigation technology, and a software Function Pack that connects your Internet-of-Things (IoT) node through a cellular network to a range of TomTom Maps APIs.

With this hardware and software package and a TomTom developer account, developers can quickly add location-based services to their IoT and Smart City applications. Among these services are the translation of global positioning system (GPS) coordinates into a street address inside a map (reverse geocoding), retrieval of nearby point of interests, and the production of accurate navigation directions.

Anders Truelsen, Managing Director of TomTom's Enterprise Business Unit, said, "We have combined TomTom's industry-leading location-based and mapmaking technologies with ST's unrivaled combination of silicon and system expertise to create a unique offering that provides easy access to TomTom's Maps APIs to empower developers to create groundbreaking, location-aware applications faster and more efficiently."

"Supporting our efforts to facilitate location-based product development, our collaboration with TomTom has built on each company's strengths to assemble a tailored package of hardware and software tools that is already fully integrated with TomTom cloud services, around the popular STM32 development ecosystem," said Alessandro Cremonesi, Group Vice President, STMicroelectronics. "These tools enable native STM32-based location services to accelerate application development of Geo-IoT solutions for fleet management, item tracking, and many other services that depend on fast, accurate location detection."

In addition to the STM32 family of Arm Cortex-M core microcontrollers, the development tools leverage ST's market-proven multi-constellation Teseo positioning-receiver technology to perform all positioning operations including tracking, acquisition, navigation, and data output.

For mapping data and services, technology companies, geographical information systems (GIS) providers, government bodies, and traffic-management institutions across the globe rely on TomTom to deliver industry-leading mapping products that create location-enabled applications.