SiWorks Inc. Announces FFT and Viterbi Cores For The Emerging IEEE 802.15.3a Multi-band OFDM UWB Standard

(Calgary, Canada - September 26th, 2003) - SiWorks Inc. a leading provider of semiconductor design services and semiconductor intellectual property, today announced that it has developed a high throughput parallel FFT core and a high throughput Viterbi core for the emerging 802.15.3a multi-band OFDM UWB standard. The company offers an extensive portfolio of signal processing cores for wired and wireless communication applications and has significant experience developing complete physical layers (PHYs) for OFDM wireless communication systems.

“The emerging 802.15.3a multi-band OFDM UWB standard requires very high speed FFT and Viterbi signal processing cores to support the proposed maximum data rates of 480Mbps,” says Roger Bertschmann, President of SiWorks. “As a result, we have developed new high-speed versions of our FFT and Viterbi cores to support this emerging standard.” SiWorks cooperated early on with the original proponents of the IEEE 802.15.3a Multiband OFDM Phy proposal. More detailed information is available on the IEEE 802.15.3a website (http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/15/pub/TG3a.html).

In addition to releasing these new UWB IP core products SiWorks has also become an official supporter of the Multiband OFDM Alliance (http://www.multibandofdm.org/). A brief summary of each core is provided below.

SCPFFT-UWB FFT/IFFT Core:
The SCFFT-UWB is an enhanced 128-point, 4 sample in parallel FFT core developed specifically for the emerging IEEE 802.15.3a multi-band OFDM standard. The FFT core computes 4 complex samples in parallel and operates in continues time, allowing 4 output samples to be generated on each clock cycle. The patent pending FFT architecture has been designed for low latency, high speed operation in both ASIC and FPGA designs. Maximum clock speeds of 132MHz in an FPGA (Xilinx Virtex II) and 200+MHz in an ASIC (0.13u process) have been achieved. SCFFT-UWB is based on SiWorks’ Parallel FFT Core technology allowing full flexibility in the choice of the number of points, samples in parallel, scaling and input, output and internal precision.

SCVITERBI-UWB-RAM Viterbi Core:
The SCVITERBI-UWB-RAM is a high speed Viterbi decoder core developed specifically for the emerging IEEE 802.15.3a multi-band OFDM standard. The core utilizes SiWorks’ 2nd generation RAM based Viterbi architecture which places the traceback memory in RAM with no latency penalty. The core offers a configurable traceback depth and soft-decision wordlength. The Radix-4 input stage allows 2 input samples to be computed in parallel allowing for very high throughput operation. The core easily achieves the 480 Mbps throughput rate required for the 802.15.3a standard. Further product information is available by contacting SiWorks.

About SiWorks Inc.
SiWorks is a leading provider of semiconductor design services and semiconductor intellectual property. SiWorks specializes in analog, digital and mixed-signal integrated circuit design for wired and wireless communications. SiWorks has successfully completed complex integrated circuit designs for both start-up and established semiconductor companies in Canada and the United States. The company has assembled a team of talented design engineers with over 80 years of experience in the design of integrated circuits. SiWorks is a privately held Canadian corporation with offices in Calgary, Alberta Canada. For more information, please visit the SiWorks web site: www.siworks.com