New CEO and new funding for Coresonic LeoCore technology sets new metric for low power and small die WiMAX solutions at WiMAX World

Coresonic AB, a leading provider of baseband processor IP technology, has announced that it has appointed industry veteran, Rick Clucas, as its CEO. Clucas has over 22 years industry experience with over 17 in the semiconductor IP industry most notably as founder and CTO of ARC International. Clucas has also spent some time as CTO of an Investment Bank working with technology companies and more recently as a business consultant to technology start-ups and as CEO of Ignios Ltd. His appointment coincides with a million euro investment into the company by Industrifonden that will enable Coresonic to market its innovative LeoCore(tm) technology into the growing WiMAX market and other demanding wireless standards.

"The timing is perfect for Coresonic which is why we are showing our technology at WiMAX world this week," explained Clucas. "WiMAX is shaping up to be a major new technology and we are ready to provide a modem baseband processor that significantly cuts the power consumption and die size while providing the flexibility that WiMax and other complex wireless standards need."

The challenge with WiMAX at the moment is that it is evolving and, as a result, there are several different variants. Creating solutions that allow for several of these in one hardwired design results in large die sizes and large power consumption. Coresonic's approach is to use a fully programmable and configurable baseband processor core that solves the problem of numerous variants simply through loading the appropriate software as required. Even for a single WiMAX variant, a LeoCore-based solution uses significantly less power than competing solutions as well as being significantly smaller due to its innovative architecture that minimises memory use and reuses hardware blocks. Moreover, adding variants to the hardwired solution increases the size and power consumption, but hardly has any impact on the LeoCore approach.

LeoCore's Single Instruction Multiple Tasks (SIMT) processor allows parallel processing using a single instruction flow - eliminating the need for multiple DSPs for multiple or complex standards. It effectively provides the performance of a VLIW architecture but with lower control overhead and much lower program and memory usage.

The core is also customisable, providing the scope for significant product differentiation, and makes it ideal as the ultimate, converged, mobile communications modem for WiMAX, DVB-T/H, WLAN 802.11a/b/g, GSM/GPRS/EDGE, Bluetooth and EDR. This multi-standard capability is aided by the LeoCore instruction set that reduces program size, enabling several different standards to be in memory simultaneously for instantaneous switching.

The LeoCore IP package includes fully portable RTL code, accelerators, programming tools, and a selection of optimised subroutines for different algorithms creating a complete solution and development environment to enable designers to rapidly create products for market.

Coresonic