Vadem’s Modular Bus Architecture Speeds Time-to-Market and Reduces Power Consumption of High-Integration CPUs, Ideal for Microsoft Windows CE Platforms and Other Portable Applications
SAN JOSE, Calif. — September 17, 1996 — Vadem announced today the Modular Bus Architecture (MBA(TM)) the industry's most powerful and flexible on-chip peripheral interconnect system. MBA brings cut-and-paste simplicity to the often arduous task of integrating on-chip peripherals with high-performance CPU cores while simultaneously providing an unprecedented level of operating system-independent power management for those peripherals. The company plans to apply MBA to its own products and will license the technology to others.
Vadem expects MBA to first be embraced by OEMs developing platforms for Microsoft's Windows CE (formerly code-named "Pegasus") operating system for handheld PCs, as MBA's quick time-to-market and power management features are ideally suited for such devices. "We view Microsoft's Windows CE OS as the driving force for the next generation of handheld PCs," said Chikok Shing, President and CEO of Vadem. "We are designing these platforms with several of our customers, and MBA will allow us to easily rev the feature sets to quickly proliferate families of platforms optimized for various market segments."
According to Mr. Shing, the market for handheld systems has been slow to develop to date. "Now, the eagerly awaited 'hockey-stick' ramp in the market is apt to begin with the availability of MBA, Windows CE, and other emerging multi-tasking operating systems that are 'power-management' aware," he added.
The conflicting requirements of lowering cost, size, and power while increasing functionality, all in an environment of shortening product lifecycles, place an ever-increasing burden on designers of handheld electronic devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), electronic organizers, and cellular phones. Increasingly, stationary consumer electronic devices such as TVs, VCRs, telephones, and the emerging category known as information appliances, though less power-sensitive, are also subject to these demands. Integrating more and more functionality into the CPU has been a key tool designers have used to satisfy these requirements, but doing so quickly enough to address shrinking market windows is becoming increasingly difficult. MBA lets designers get ahead of the curve.
By establishing a standard interface between CPU cores and on-chip peripherals, MBA allows new and existing conforming peripherals to be "plugged in" during the design of a single-chip system in much the same way add-in cards are added to a PC, or reuseable objects are used in object-oriented programming languages . The result is a much faster design cycle, particularly if a peripheral has been previously synthesized for another design. And, because MBA is applicable to virtually any CPU or peripheral, it may be used with any chip vendor's library of parts. Among the peripherals which MBA can accommodate are controllers for memory, LCDs, IrDA links, serial, parallel, and keyboard ports, and USB. MBA may be bridged to off-chip peripherals through Vadem's SingleBus (patent pending) which may be dynamically configured as any of a number of common expansion buses, including CardBus, PCMCIA, and ISA.
MBA actually defines two separate buses, one which runs at the speed of the CPU and one which runs at the speed of the slowest peripheral, allowing the designer to match peripherals to the appropriate bus to maximize overall system performance. In addition, the peripheral's MBA interface includes proprietary power management logic allowing the peripheral to power itself down when not in use. This augments the all-or-nothing approach of operating system-directed power management in which a variety of suspend/sleep states are controlled by the operating system but which are applied to the entire CPU rather than individual peripherals on the CPU. Performing power management in each peripheral allows power consumption to be reduced in situations in which it is not possible to power-down the entire CPU. It also allows power management to take place independently of the operating system, extending sophisticated power management to applications in which the operating system may be incapable of providing it.
Addressing the performance and cost requirements of these and other emerging systems, Henry Fung, Vadem's Vice-President of Engineering, added, "We continue to focus our core competencies in silicon, software, and system design on developing the most highly-optimized solutions available today. This architecture is literally optimized to the penny and the microamp to ensure that the right amount of performance and the necessary flexibility are available in the absolute minimum space and at the lowest possible power."
Vadem Vice-President of Marketing, Ahmet Alpdemir, continued, "We will target and support a wide range of applications as dictated by our customers. MBA will be extended to our X86 line of CPUs, as well as a line of RISC CPUs we will be introducing shortly. MBA will allow our customers to take a no-compromise approach to choosing just the right feature set, price point, performance, and development environment for their products."
Vadem has been a leader in the design and marketing of highly-optimized hardware, software, and system architectures for high-volume, portable applications since 1983 and holds several patents on power management techniques. The company has applied its core competencies in silicon design, system firmware, and application software to pioneer product categories with some of the industry's most highly-integrated designs. These include portable PCs (Zenith Z-191 and eaZy PC, Sharp PC-4500 and PC-7000), personal intelligent communicators (IBM Simon and PCRadio, LG HandyPDA), and PDAs (H-P OmniGo, Sharp PT-9000, and NEC Mobile Gear). Vadem is privately held. Its headquarters are located at 1960 Zanker Rd., San Jose, CA 95112. The company may be reached at 408-467-2100, [email protected], and http://www.vadem.com.
NOTE: Vadem and MBA are trademarks of Vadem, Inc. Microsoft is a trademark of Microsoft Corp., IrDA is a trademark of the Infrared Data Association.
SOURCE: Vadem, Inc.
CONTACT:
Ahmet Alpdemir of Vadem, Inc., 408-467-2100, or fax, 408-467-2199;
or
Bruce LeBoss of ChipShots, Inc., 800-593-CHIP, or fax, 408-541-2185