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14th June 2007

New design service provides access to advanced DSP technology for software radio applications

• Next-generation wireless demands more compute power - service supports adoption of multi-core DSP platform

Cambridge Consultants has become the first authorised design centre for picoChip's multi-core digital signal processor (DSP), picoArray.

picoArray devices incorporate arrays of DSP elements, delivering extremely high performance. This makes them ideal for the computationally-intensive tasks involved in advanced wireless signal processing, while also providing adaptability that can be employed to accommodate operational problems such as varying channel conditions, or changes in the service profile of the communications system. The devices are available in forms suitable for both infrastructure and user terminal applications, offering a powerful platform to develop products for emerging global wireless communications markets such as WiMAX and 4G.

Cambridge Consultants offers considerable design experience of the device gained on complex design projects undertaken for picoChip and third parties, plus a large design team that is active across the spectrum of wireless technologies.

"Cambridge Consultants has field-proven expertise with picoArray, which includes helping us to create sophisticated reference designs," says Rupert Baines of picoChip. "Our architecture offers a platform that can reduce costs and improve flexibility in many emerging applications, and Cambridge Consultants undoubtedly has the expertise to cut time-to-market for new users. We are delighted to welcome them as our first authorised design centre."

"The ability to dynamically configure DSP elements for application-specific computation, and parallel processing, makes picoArray an exceptionally powerful solution for the complex processing stages involved in applications such as WiMAX and 3.5/4G," notes Cambridge Consultants' Tim Fowler. "Our understanding of the ways to exploit this processing architecture, combined with our in-house software radio modelling and testing framework, allows us to provide expert support that can help define system architectures and shorten development projects."

He adds: "picoChip's existing reference designs and tools provide a simple to apply solution for major emerging applications. This service targets developers who wish to add value, or create entirely new product concepts."

The very high performance and flexibility of picoArray devices opens up many applications in wireless communications, particularly in the evolution of major wireless system technologies such as 3G and WiMAX. Developers are continually striving to squeeze more and more capacity from the available radio spectrum. Among many new advances being considered to increase the capacity and quality of next-generation wireless communications systems are advanced data modulation techniques, air interfaces employing multiple antennas and beam-forming techniques, and multi-user detection. Techniques like these demand new levels of processing power, usually combined with a high degree of flexibility and reconfiguration - attributes that are at the heart of the picoArray's multi-processor architecture with its reconfigurable-datapath.

picoArray's programmable processing elements are optimized for high-performance signal processing, delivering ten times better performance/dollar than legacy architectures. The picoArray may be configured dynamically for compute-intensive datapath operations such as filtering, FFT, path metric calculation and correlation. Devices also have enormous amounts of general-purpose MIPs to handle the ever more complex control operations of modern wireless systems.

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