IP companies, Vulcan Machines Ltd. and Jennic Ltd., offer Wireless Java platform

IP companies offer Wireless Java platform
By Peter Clarke, EE Times
March 27, 2001 (12:50 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20010326S0043

LONDON — Two of England's newer intellectual property (IP) players, Vulcan Machines Ltd. and Jennic Ltd., are teaming up to offer a Wireless Java platform that the companies have developed jointly.

Vulcan (Royston, England) brings its Moon-1, a 32-bit Java byte code processor, to the party, while Jennic (Sheffield, England) has developed a Streaming Data Controller (SDC) that can be fitted with separate postprocessor packet-formatting hardware modules to address different communication standards.

The first version of the SDC is being characterized to address the Bluetooth wireless communications protocol. When joined to the Moon-1 processor the combination is known as Moonbeam, the two companies said.

"Jennic has the SDC and its configurability means that we can move quickly on to 802.11a and then on to other wireless LAN standards. We have a road map for Wireless Java going forward," said Mark Goodson, marketing director at Vulcan.

Tim Bassford, technical marketing manager at Jennic, said the SDC is a direct-memory-access engine with a programmable media-access controller that could be used for Bluetooth, 802.11a, HiperLAN-2 or IEEE 1394 by changing the packet formatter. "Each formatter is about three months of engineering work," Bassford said, adding that Jennic was committed to offering only Bluetooth and 802.11a.

"Customers will sign a license agreement with the two companies, Jennic and Vulcan, but there will be one set of deliverables, source code, testbenches, synthesis scripts. Any integration services will be provided by Jennic," Goodson said.

According to Rob MacAulay, technical director at Vulcan, the companies will be able to provide source code in either the VHDL or Verilog hardware-description languages.

Goodson said the model will include an initial license fee and a royalty. He also said it would be relatively low cost compared with a piece of IP from ARM Ltd. (Cambridge, England).

Moon and Moonbeam ar e destined to face competition from ARM and other sources, with ARM offering its own Jazelle adaptation of the ARM core able to run compiled C and native Java byte code.

"Moon-1 can be deployed as a Java native processor or as a coprocessor," Goodson said. "In fact we have a demo where Moon acts as coprocessor to ARM, which might be popular in wireless handset applications.

"Our intention is to make this a small, lightweight and low-cost solution, and at only 27,000 gates it is exactly that," Goodson said.

Both Goodson and MacAuley declined to give any performance criteria for Moon-1 except to say that the processor had been running in FPGA for more than a year and that ASIC simulation suggested an attainable 100-MHz clock frequency in a standard 0.18-micron CMOS process technology.

"We're looking at 66 to 133 MHz but you probably wouldn't want or need to run at anywhere near that frequency," MacAulay said. "What we are saying is [Moon-1 offers] 10 times the performance of a Java Virtual Mach ine running on a processor at the same speed."

However, the Moonbeam platform may face competition from Zucotto Wireless Inc. (San Diego), which has forged agreements with Alcatel on the radio frequency circuits, and with PacketVideo Corp. (San Diego) on MPEG-4.

Ironically, Jennic's SDC is based on a Tangent-A4 32-bit RISC processor licensed from ARC Cores Ltd. (Elstree, England), although it is not clear whether licensees of Moonbeam will have to reach a separate agreement with ARC Cores.