News Release from: Bops
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 8 November 2001
Processor brings wireless standards together
Bops has introduced its Mobile Wireless Processor (MWP) created in TSMC's 0.13-micron 1.2V process.
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Bops has introduced its Mobile Wireless Processor (MWP) created in TSMC's 0.13-micron 1.2V process. The evaluation chip easily handles PHY processing for 802.11a, 802.11b and HiperLAN/2 PHY processing with no compromise in power compared to fixed function alternatives. Jack Quinn, president, Micrologic Research, said: "With the wireless LAN industry about to splinter into several standards which will only be partially compatible with each other, wireless LAN chips will have to be programmable.
Bops' MWP and licensable WirelessRay DSP are excellent examples of products that address the need for programmable wireless LAN devices with no compromise in cost or power".
Micrologic Research estimates that 25 million wireless LAN nodes will ship worldwide in 2005.
Central to the MWP evaluation chip is Bops new low-power WirelessRay core, which is the first DSP core to compete head-on with single-mode wireless LAN fixed-function designs.
"This changes everything", explained Ivan Greenberg, vice president, platform marketing.
"In the past, fixed function ASICs were a no-brainer when developing wireless LAN baseband SOCs.
With a die footprint of 6mm2 and power consumption of 70mW, WirelessRay is the first DSP to deliver multi-mode PHY functionality at cost parity with fixed function alternatives.
Device manufactures can finally have the best of three worlds - flexibility of DSP, low cost/area ratio of fixed function and high performance/power ratio of fixed function".
WirelessRay is a specific implementation of Bops ManArray multi-parallel architecture optimised for portable wireless LAN applications.
Its instruction set architecture (ISA) has been extended to provide rich support for complex data type, acceleration of complex FFT/IFFT, flexible support for bit insertion/extraction, and smooth flow of byte wide data types.
Owing to the wide architecture and extensive parallelism of the WirelessRay core, it is able to perform PHY layer processing for 802.11a, 802.11b, and HiperLAN/2.
Additionally, Bops Halo compiler, included in Bops' software development kit (SDK) and bundled with the WirelessRay product, enables fast time to market of rock-solid multimode PHY software.
The Bops MWP was designed using industry-standard, low-power synthesis tools from Synopsys with custom-designed memories and register files.
In addition to the WirelessRay DSP core, the chip incorporates110Kbyte of on-chip RAM, a PCI interface, an SDRAM interface and SysAD bus, and delivers 6000MIPS of performance while consuming 300mW of power.
The evaluation chip is available for licensing today and will be incorporated into Bops' wireless LAN development platform, which will be available Q1 2002.
BOPS customers can work with BOPS' best-of-breed wireless LAN alliance partners to get shrink-wrapped multimode baseband SoC including 802.11a software, 802.11b software, physical design, and all hardware IP blocks associated with baseband processing.
Customers who want more control can also take delivery of the WirelessRay core in RTL format.
Bops offers flexible licensing options including multi-use, per-use and single-use licenses.
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