Ubicom - Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia

Type Subsidiary Founded May 1998		Website www.qca.qualcomm.com Parent organization Qualcomm Atheros
Key people Teresa H. Meng, founder and directorCraig H. Barratt, President Products Ethernet WLAN Bluetooth GPS Powerline communications Hybrid Wired/WirelessLocation Headquarters San Jose, California, United States

Ubicom was a San Jose, CA-based company which developed communications and media processor (CMP) and software platforms for real-time interactive applications and multimedia content delivery in the digital home. The company provided optimized system-level solutions to OEMs for a wide range of products including wireless routers, access points, VoIP gateways, streaming media devices, print servers and other network devices. Ubicom was a venture-backed, privately held company with corporate headquarters in San Jose, California.

History

Ubicom was founded as Scenix Semiconductor in 1996. The company operated under that name until 1999. In 2000, Scenix became "Ubicom," a word derived from "ubiquitous communications".

Apr 1999: Mayfield Fund leads $10 million equity investment in Scenix.

Nov 2000: Scenix changes its name to Ubicom.

Nov 2002: Intersil and Ubicom demonstrate world's first 802.11g wireless access point.

Mar 2006: Ubicom secures $20 million in Series 3 funding, led by Investcorp Technology Ventures.

Mar 2012: Ubicom is taken over by Qualcomm.

Products

Ubicom (and as Scenix) designed several families of microcontrollers, including:

The SX Series of 8-bit microcontrollers, a product line which was partially compatible with Arizona Microchip devices and ran at up to 100 MHz, single cycle. This product was eventually sold to Parallax, who continue its production.

The IP series of high performance media and Internet processors. These devices were designed to act as gateways for streaming media and data over wired and wireless links.

The Scenix/Ubicom processors relied on very high speed and low latency processing to emulate hardware interfaces in software such as interrupt-polled soft-UARTS. This reduced the size of the silicon chip and therefore the cost, but increased the complexity of the software required on the chip.

Ubicom developed its own architecture, the Ubicom32™, and a real-time operating system (RTOS) for it. For example, the D-Link HD Media Router 3000 DIR-857 contains the Ubicom IP8000AU and the Western Digital WD N900 the Ubicom IP8260U CPU. The firmwares are most probably Linux-based, maybe even OpenWrt-based, rather than Ubicom RTOS-based.

Logging in via telnet on a Western Digital N900, the CPU is known as:

# cat /proc/cpuinfo Vendor : UbicomCPU : IP8KMMU : enabledFPU : enabledArch : 4Rev : 1Clock Freq : 600.0 MHzDDR Freq : 533.0 MHzBogoMips : 589.82Calibration : 294912000 loopsHardware : UbicomIP8Kcpu[00] : thread id - 6cpu[01] : thread id - 2cpu[02] : thread id - 3cpu[03] : thread id - 4cpu[04] : thread id - 5# # cat /proc/interrupts CPU0 CPU1 CPU2 CPU3 CPU4 Reentrant? 2: 340937 361457 429308 449005 359141 0 UbicoIPI ipi 27: 0 0 399980568 0 0 8216 Ubicom32 ubi32_na 33: 30709990 0 0 0 0 25334 Ubicom32 timer-primary 34: 0 11470112 0 0 0 3743 Ubicom32 timer-cpu 35: 0 0 23060922 0 0 14194 Ubicom32 timer-cpu 36: 0 0 0 41134181 0 56087 Ubicom32 timer-cpu 37: 0 0 0 0 8820184 2088 Ubicom32 timer-cpu 44: 0 0 0 0 0 0 PCIE-MSI aerdrv 58: 0 0 0 0 0 0 Ubicom32 FAN SPEED 60: 0 0 0 0 0 0 PCIE-MSI aerdrv 70: 1 0 0 0 0 0 Ubicom32 dwc_otg, dwc_otg_hcd:usb1 71: 1 0 0 0 0 0 Ubicom32 dwc_otg, dwc_otg_hcd:usb2 82: 0 0 0 0 0 0 Ubicom32 UBI32_SERDES 83: 60986 58900 60267 63509 63382 5056 Ubicom32 UBI32_SERDES 2 92: 0 33996835 0 0 0 0 Ubicom32 wifi1 93: 0 33996835 0 0 0 0 Ubicom32 pciej 94: 0 0 0 31041951 0 0 Ubicom32 wifi0 95: 0 0 0 31041951 0 2 Ubicom32 pciek

so it appears as some sort of low-frequency (600 MHz) multithreaded CPU (5 threads).

References

Ubicom Wikipedia

(Text) CC BY-SA

Contents

History

Products

References