Coresonic lays claim to world’s smallest and most efficient mobile WiMAX

Swedish IP vendor Coresonic has demonstrated its mobile WiMax core that it belives is the world’s smallest and most efficient WiMAX solution. It has shown the LeoCore WiMAX personality pack running on a new FPGA-based evaluation system to show how it is possible to add a complete mobile WiMAX solution to any device with just 1.5qs mm of silicon using a 65nm process.
The LeoCore multicore hardware and firmware can be added to any new chip design, such as media processors for digital cameras, application processors for UMD devices and other products.
"The performance and flexibility available from such a small and efficient system has to be seen to be believed," said Rick Clucas, CEO of Coresonic. "When we tell potential customers that they can add WiMAX connectivity with such little additional silicon and such low power, their immediate reaction is one of disbelief so they ask us to prove it; this is exactly what we will be doing with our WiMAX personality pack demo.”

“Some market commentators are suggesting that if WiMAX can be added to existing products for under $10, then the WiMAX market could take off rapidly. Others are indicating that LTE is the way forward. The key point with Coresonic’s solution is that our LeoCore technology can add WiMAX connectivity to any device with very little incremental cost and size. Secondly, because our solution is programmable, our customers will be able to quickly adapt their products to whatever standard they need to address by licensing new firmware such as LTE.”
Coresonic’s solution is available for license as semiconductor intellectual property and firmware, and the FPGA-evaluation platform is available for onsite demonstration or purchase. The demo system runs at 80MHz, enough to perform 5MHz single antenna WiMAX channels as well as other standards such as WiFi.
Full mobile WiMAX wave 2 solutions only require a maximum clock speed of 250MHz to run on LeoCore. Coupled with the very small gate count, even in a worst case scenario of constant full usage and no power management, the power consumption using Coresonic’s technology would still be less than 50mW in a 65nm process. When power management and real-life usage patterns are added, the actual figure would be a fraction of this, says Clucas.