Icera unveils Livanto™
The world's first wireless soft modem IC for cellular Terminals, based on DXP™ - The world's highest performance signal processor
- Generic wireless soft modem IC
- Based on DXP™ Deep-eXecution Processor
- Complete physical layer plus protocol stack in software – no hardware acceleration
- Dynamically scalable performance
- Low power standby modes and advanced power saving features
- Wide range of on-chip wireless interfaces
- Low cost and small footprint solution
Bristol, UK November 14th 2005. Icera has today announced general availability of its Livanto™ ICE8020 chip, the first wireless soft modem IC that fully meets the strict power and cost constraints of mobile phone and wireless datacard applications. Livanto™ ICE8020 has been sampling to lead customers since September 2005.
Stan Boland, President & CEO of Icera said: “After three years of intense development, we are delighted to announce general availability of our first chip, Livanto™. It’s the first time out for the new DXP™ processor, easily the world’s highest performance generic wireless processor. Our first chips are fully functional and meet or beat all speed and yield specifications. We have designed Livanto™ so we can meet all processing requirements for multi-megabit data rates, both downlink and uplink, yet still offer the lowest power consumption in the industry, all from a fully flexible solution. Not surprisingly, we have huge interest from terminal OEMs and operators alike.”
Livanto™ is the first commercial wireless soft modem that supports the highest performance HSDPA solutions plus other advanced wireless standards. Specifically engineered to adapt and scale to support multiple, current and future wireless standards for next generation multimode wireless terminals and handsets, without being tied to any one standard, Livanto™ delivers a new level of flexibility.
Livanto™ is based on a totally new class of processor, created by Icera, called the DXP™ or Deep eXecution Processor. With DXP™ providing full execution for all advanced cellular wireless physical layers, code-efficient protocol stack, voice codecs and drivers, Livanto™ delivers a complete wireless modem – all in software with no hardware acceleration. Since the physical layer can now be supported entirely in software, compute resources can be dynamically switched to where they best deliver modem performance.
The overall impact is to greatly improve modem performance and efficiency for any given standard. This flexibility will ensure Icera tracks standards at a faster pace than any competitor and will accelerate the integration of multiple air interfaces onto the same chip at no extra silicon real estate or power expense.
When supporting cellular wireless standards such as HSDPA, Livanto™ ICE8020 has low power consumption, at or below that of any conventional baseband solution. Livanto™ delivers additional power-saving features, including dynamic voltage scaling and advanced clock gating. In addition, because phone terminals spend most of their time in a network paging standby mode, waiting for a call in a pocket or handbag, for example, the Livanto™ device includes a sleep mode using ultra-low power timed wake-up resources to further extend battery life.
Livanto™ supports a wide range of external memories including NAND, NOR, SDRAM, PSRAM and mobile DDR. For communication with other chips in a system, it delivers support for MIPI’s HSI applications processor interface, as well as a broad range of SPI, UART and other serial interfaces. In addition, Livanto™ supports both single and dual antenna RF systems, via analog and digital interfaces and includes a direct SIM interface with on-chip transceivers.
Livanto™ ICE8020 is built in an advanced, low-leakage 90nm CMOS process technology at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s largest independent foundry.
A range of HSDPA datacard and phone platforms are planned based on the Livanto™ ICE8020 wireless soft modem device.
For further information, please contact:
Sally Doherty
Icera Inc.
Tel: +44 1454 284800
Email: sally@icerasemi.com
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