Software Defined Baseband
Currently, besides the general purpose processors every mobile device has a number of baseband processing units to support the various communication and connectivity standards. Similarly to the ARM business model a new trend is gaining momentum where chip suppliers instead of developing in-house the baseband IP select to license 3rd party DSP IP cores to support the baseband functionality of various wireless standards. A cornerstone of this design trend is the optimized software executed in DSP cores and this is the area where Antcor focuses on.
Why there is a need for Software defined baseband implementations?
As consumers demand electronic products with more connectivity, portability and capability, semiconductor manufacturers face ever growing pressures to make smaller, feature-rich integrated circuits that are more reliable, less expensive and have greater performance, all in the face of decreasing product lifecycles and constrained battery power. While semiconductor manufacturing processes have advanced significantly to allow a substantial increase in the number of circuits placed on a single chip, resources for design capabilities have not kept pace with the advances in manufacturing processes, resulting in a growing “design gap” between the increasing manufacturing potential and the constrained design capabilities.
Given the “design gap,” as well as the complexity and the unique skill set required to develop a DSP core, many semiconductor design and manufacturing companies increasingly choose to license proven intellectual property, such as processor cores (e.g. DSPs) and memory and application-specific platforms, from silicon intellectual property (SIP) companies.
What we offer
With more complex designs and shorter time to market, it is no longer cost efficient and becoming progressively more difficult for most semiconductor companies to develop the software for their DSP-based applications.
Antcor’s objective is to capitalize on this trend and be the leading software provider of WIFI and LTE baseband implementations.
We enable this goal with proven and pre-optimized implementations, which at the same time are easily accommodated to chip vendors’ requirements.
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