Taiwanese SoC aims for residential gateways

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Apr 11, 2003

ADMtek, a leading Taiwanese fabless semiconductor company and MIPS licensee since September 2002, has successfully taped out its first MIPS-based SoC design for the worldwide home gateway market.

ADMtek, a leading Taiwanese fabless semiconductor company and MIPS licensee since September 2002, has successfully taped out a MIPS-based SoC design for the worldwide home gateway market.

One of Taiwan's leading fabless vendors, ADMtek has more than 50% market share of the home gateway market.

This MIPS-based chip, implemented in a 0.18-micron process by Chartered Semiconductor, integrates a MIPS32 4Kc core with a six-port switch engine, PHY, USB 1.1 host and a PCI bridge.

Other features include NAND Flash and NOR Flash supports, which help to reduce system cost.

Other applications for the ADM5120 chip include networking security devices, firewalls, VPN routers and wireless networking gateways.

The networking chip market grew rapidly in 2002.

According to the Institute for Information Industry in Taiwan, total shipments of switch-related chips are expected to grow by 17% in the first quarter of 2003.

The growth in the home gateway market is due, in part, to leading Taiwan fabless semiconductor companies, such as ADMtek, that are expanding the technology's appeal to consumers with lower-cost solutions.

"Taiwanese semiconductor companies need to leverage industry-standard technology, such as the MIPS architecture, in order to reduce costs and increase competitiveness to compete in the global marketplace with leading IC suppliers", said Tony Chang, President of ADMtek.

"When combined with the MIPS architecture's broad ecosystem of third party software tools and optimized peripheral IP, we are confident our solution will become the first choice for OEMs looking for low-cost, highly competitive SoCs".

"The low power consumption and high performance features of MIPS cores are ideal for networking applications that demand high integration, high media processing and high data bandwidth", said Jack Browne, Vice President of Worldwide Sales at MIPS Technologies.

"With the ADM5120 chip, ADMtek joins other MIPS licensees who have taped out more than a hundred 32bit MIPS chips over the years.

The result is MIPS-based solutions are gaining market share in numerous embedded market segments".