Fast growth for RadioScape

The Sunday Times Tech Track 100 has placed RadioScape at number 16 in its annual review of Britain's fastest growing unquoted technology companies.

The Sunday Times Tech Track 100 has placed RadioScape at number 16 in its annual review of Britain's fastest growing unquoted technology companies.

This is the latest in a string of awards for the company that includes being placed in the 2001 Wall Street Journal Europe's Business Innovation Awards, Time magazine's top 50 European tech companies 2002, BT Vision 100 Awards 2002, and Tornado Insider's top 100 most promising and innovative emerging private tech companies in Europe and Israel for 2002.

A privately held company founded in 1996, RadioScape focuses on providing solutions for two challenging areas of technology - digital audio broadcast (DAB) and 3G wireless.

Its software approach to wireless systems development has been so successful that RadioScape is now the UK market leader for DAB transmitter systems.

Its DAB receiver chip software is used by Texas Instruments and enables digital radios to be retailed at the sub GBP 100 ($150) price - a key breakthrough to achieving mass-market penetration of digital radio.

This digital radio expertise is currently being deployed in the creation of a solution to the challenges of developing 3G mobile phones.

At present, the communications systems for 3G mobile phone handsets, PDAs and other wireless devices are very difficult to design as they have to be able to handle the complex task of seamlessly integrating different communications standards - 3G, GSM, 802.11, Bluetooth, UMTS, W-CDMA etc - within a compact, low power consumption unit.

"This task has proved a major headache for designers of next generation 3G-based devices", explained John Hall, RadioScape's CEO, "with the result that handsets have been delayed and the whole rollout of 3G is behind schedule.

We realised that the innovative solutions that we created for DAB could be adapted for 3G and we are currently commercialising this as a product called the Communication Virtual Machine (CVM) for launch early next year.

We already have a lead customer and are in discussion with several others as early adopters".

The CVM manages various communication standards within the phone in real time and, as a result, multimode 3G devices can now progress from initial design through to final product quicker, cheaper and with less risk of delay due to CVM's ability to manage system complexity.

The CVM also aids 3G basestation manufacturers, because it significantly reduces the costs and complexity of designing 3G basestations through its ability to optimise the underlying communications hardware required to support emerging wireless Internet applications and higher capacity voice traffic.

3G deployment requires a huge number of basestations and the CVM's optimisation features enable equipment manufacturers to make the next generation of basestations much quicker and at a significantly lower cost than at present.

The resulting products are appealing to network operators as the drop in price of the resulting high-capacity, low cost per channel basestations make 3G an affordable technology.

"The awards by these premier organisations are a recognition of CVM's innovation and potential to make the dream of 3G a reality by removing key bottlenecks, resulting in them describing RadioScape as one of the top European technology companies", concluded Hall.

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