Lucent Technologies Inc.’s Microelectronics Group plans to unveil today a digital signal processor system-on-a-chip family for next-generation wireless and Internet networks that provides significant channel density improvements.
The product family, called StarPro, is based on the StarCore SC140 DSP core architecture developed jointly by Lucent and Motorola Inc.
Lucent said the StarPro product family offers more than four times today’s typical voice and data channels per chip for wireless switches, voice over Internet Protocol gateways and remote access servers. The SC140 can process up to 64 wideband Code Division Multiple Access base station voice or data channels, speech coding and echo cancellation of 64 wireless voice channels or V.90 data channels, said the company.
“One of the things we’re finding in the wireless business, and other businesses as well, is a move toward more complex standards that are now driven by data as opposed to voice,” said Charlie Mera, director of wireless infrastructure at Lucent’s Microelectronics Group. “With that, the compute requirements are growing significantly.”
Mera said third-generation networks require 100 times more compute power than second-generation networks. Improving DSP channel density allows carriers to meet the requirements of next-generation networks while keeping costs, power usage and size to a minimum.
“Channel density, cost, power and size are key issues that our customers are concerned about as they design new generations of products,” said Mera.
In addition to the channel density improvements, the chip offers speedier time to market because it is built on a modular DSP platform architecture.
“What we’re doing is expanding what a core is by changing the boundaries,” said Mera. “Traditionally, the core was the compute engine. Now what we’re saying is the core is not only the compute engine but also the local memory subsystem and we’re defining a bus architecture onto which other components can be plugged in.”
StarPro 2000 is the first chip in the StarPro family and the first Lucent chip to be based on the StarCore SC140 DSP core, said the company. The StarPro 2000 integrates three StarCore SC140 cores on a single chip-each operating at 300 MHz and performing 4 multiply and accumulates per second-along with 768 kilobytes of on-chip shared memory and application-specific chip peripherals with direct memory access. All of the platform components interconnect via the company’s recently announced Daytona bus, a 128-bit wide split-transaction bus developed by Bell Labs. The bus allows sharing of on-chip resources without compromising system performance, said the company.
