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News Release from: Faraday Technology | Subject: UWB MAC
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 26 July 2007
UWB MAC speeds comms with fewer pins
Ultrawideband media access controller IP enables the design of SoCs with higher transfer rates and lower pin counts.
New ultrawideband (UWB) media access controller (MAC) IP from Faraday Technology enables higher transfer rates with lower pin counts for system-on-chip designs Faraday will be demonstrating the UWB MAC IP with a video streaming platform in the upcoming Embedded System Conference in Taipei
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 2 Feb 2007 at 8.00am (UK)
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The UWB is a technology for transmitting data over a large bandwidth while sharing spectrum with other wireless applications.
Driven by the 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 current UWB ASSPs can only achieve 100Mbit/s or less throughput, due to the low bandwidth limitation of USB and SDIO interfaces.
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Although UWB with Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) interface has better performance, it comes at the expense of high pin counts, and so is not suitable for pad-limited deep-submicron SoC designs.
By integrating Faraday's UWB MAC into SoC designs, designers can easily achieve 200Mbit/s throughput and significantly reduce 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", says 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 uses industry-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 optimised 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", says Thomas Hsieh, Associated Vice President of Central R and D at Faraday.
"Furthermore, Faraday's UWB MAC supports hardware accelerator-based Prioritised 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".
Faraday's UWB MAC IP core is available now, together with a video streaming demo platform that includes: Faraday's UWB MAC IP in an FPGA; Faraday's FIC8120 media platform; a WiMedia registered PHY; and a real-time IP camera and a noncompressed video data streaming from 720 x 1080 pixel resolution movie clips.
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