Faraday Announces UWB MAC Solution for Wireless Applications that Require High-Throughput

-- Faraday Technology Corporation, a leading ASIC and silicon IP provider, today announced the availability of the Ultra-Wideband (UWB) Medium Access Controller (MAC) solution. Adding onto Faraday's leading edge ASIC design service and broad IP portfolio, the newly released UWB solution enables higher transfer rate at lower pin count for System-on-Chip (SoC) designs. Faraday will be demonstrating the UWB MAC IP with a video streaming platform in the upcoming Embedded System Conference (August 23-24, Taipei).

The UWB is a technology for transmitting data over a large bandwidth while sharing spectrum with other wireless applications. Driven by WiMedia Alliance, UWB is a booming technology that aims at high-speed wireless, personal-area network in the multimedia-capable PC, consumer electronics and mobile markets. However, most of current UWB ASSPs (Application Specific Standard Products) can only achieve 100Mbps or less throughput, due to the low bandwidth limitation of USB and SDIO interfaces. Although UWB with Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) interface has better performance, it comes with too many pin counts, and thus undesirable for the pad-limited deep-submicron SoC designs. By integrating UWB MAC into the SoC designs, designers can easily achieve 200Mbps+ throughput and significantly reduce the chip's pin counts.

"While most UWB providers focus heavily on interface chips, Faraday is the first ASIC design service company to provide the SoC integration with UWB," said Charlie Cheng, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at Faraday. "The solution of UWB MAC into SoC makes it perfectly fit the high throughput required applications, such as the consumer electronics and the external storage products."

Faraday's UWB MAC solution utilizes industrial standard MAC-PHY Interface (MPI) as the interface between the SoC and the external UWB PHY chip. Besides, Faraday's expertise in system and architecture planning, and sophistication in the communication circuit design always play important roles in Faraday's ASIC business. The optimized performance on UWB MAC solution is the result of years of experience in the SoC hardware and software integration, which also benefits our customers in building throughput hungry applications.

"The novel FIFO (First In First Out) and DMA (Direct Memory Access) mechanisms make Faraday's UWB MAC an attractive solution that features high throughput and low cost for applications that require multiple streaming supports," said Thomas Hsieh, Associated Vice President of Central R&D at Faraday. "Furthermore, Faraday's UWB MAC supports hardware accelerator-based Prioritized Channel Access (PCA); it will be excellent for products that requires high throughput, such as wireless USB, cable replacement products, and personal-area networking applications."

Availability

• Faraday's UWB MAC IP core is available now.
• The video streaming demo platform includes:
•  Faraday's UWB MAC IP in an FPGA
• Faraday's FIC8120 media platform
• WiMedia registered PHY
• A real-time IP camera and a non-compressed video data streaming from 720 x 1080 pixel resolution movie clips

Faraday Technology Corporation is a leading silicon IP and fabless ASIC vendor. The company's broad silicon IP portfolio includes 32-bit RISC CPUs, DSPs, MPEG4, H.264, PHYs/Controllers for USB 2.0, Ethe rnet, Serial ATA, PCI Express, Cell Library and Memory Compiler. With more than 700 employees and 2006 revenue of US$171 million, Faraday is one of the largest fabless ASIC companies in the Asia-Pacific region, and it also has a significant presence in other world-wide markets. Headquartered in Taiwan , Faraday has service and support offices around the world, including the U.S. , Japan , Europe, and China . For more information, please visit: www.faraday-tech.com .