BOPS Proves performance/power leadership with Multi-Mode (802.11a & 802.11b) Wireless LAN Solution in silicon

Mountain View, Calif., November 5, 2001 - BOPS, Inc., a leading provider of programmable broadband DSP cores, today announced its Mobile Wireless Processor (MWP) created in TSMC's 0.13 micron 1.2v process. The evaluation chip builds upon BOPS power/performance leadership. It easily handles PHY processing for 802.11a, 802.11b, and HiperLAN/2 PHY processing with no compromise in power compared to fixed function alternatives.

Jack Quinn, president, Micrologic Research, said: "With the wireless LAN industry about to splinter into several standards which will only be partially compatible with each other, wireless LAN chips will have to be programmable. BOPS^® MWP and licensable WirelessRay^TM DSP are excellent examples of products that address the need for programmable Wireless LAN devices with no compromise in cost or power."

Micrologic Research estimates that 25 million wireless LAN nodes will ship worldwide in 2005.

Central to the MWP evaluation chip is BOPS new low-power WirelessRay core, which is the first DSP core to compete head-on with single-mode wireless LAN fixed-function designs.

"This changes everything," explained Ivan Greenberg, vice president, platform marketing. "In the past, fixed function ASICs were a no-brainer when developing wireless LAN baseband SOCs. With a die footprint of 6mm2 and power consumption of 70mW, WirelessRay is the first DSP to deliver multi-mode PHY functionality at cost parity with fixed function alternatives. Device manufactures can finally have the best of three worlds - flexibility of DSP, low cost/area ratio of fixed function and high performance/power ratio of fixed function".

WirelessRay is a specific implementation of BOPS ManArray^® multi-parallel architecture optimized for portable wireless LAN applications. Its Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) has been extended to provide rich support for complex data type, acceleration of complex FFT/IFFT, flexible support for bit insertion/extraction, and smooth flow of byte wide data types. Owing to the wide architecture and extensive parallelism of the WirelessRay core, it is able to perform PHY layer processing for 802.11a, 802.11b, and HiperLAN/2.

Additionally, BOPS Halo^TM compiler, included in BOPS Software Development Kit (SDK) and bundled with the WirelessRay product, enables fast time-to-market of rock-solid multi-mode PHY software. (Halo, recently benchmarked by EEMBC -- www.eembc.org/benchmark -- set an industry record for optimized C performance in EEMBC's telecom benchmark suite.)

The BOPS MWP was designed using industry-standard, low-power synthesis tools from Synopsys with custom-designed memories and register files. In addition to the WirelessRay DSP core, the chip incorporates110kB of on-chip RAM, PCI I/F, SDRAM I/F, and SysAD bus, and delivers 6000 MIPS of performance while consuming 300mW of power. The evaluation chip is available for licensing today and will be incorporated into BOPS Wireless LAN development platform, which will be available Q1 2002.

BOPS customers can work with BOPS best-of-breed wireless LAN alliance partners to get shrink-wrapped multi-mode baseband SOC including 802.11a software, 802.11b software, physical design, and all hardware IP blocks associated with baseband processing. Customers who want more control can also take delivery of the WirelessRay core in Register Transfer Language (RTL) format. WirelessRay and MWP product briefs are available at http://www.bops.com.

BOPS, Inc. offers flexible licensing options including multi-use, per-use and single-use licenses.

About BOPS
Based in Mountain View, Calif., BOPS, Inc. licenses and integrates scalable broadband DSP cores used in communications, mobile multimedia and wireless SOCs. BOPS offers a complete SOC prototyping environment for accelerated time to market, reduced risk, and ease of integration with ARM and MIPS. BOPS^®-based SOCs are supported by an extensive alliance of hardware, software, and design partners. For more information, please visit http://www.bops.com.

Note to editors: BOPS is a registered trademark and ManArray is a trademark of BOPS, Inc. All other brands or product names are the property of their respective holders.