OAKLAND, Calif. – Imagination Technologies launched versions of its Ensigma cores powering Wi-Fi/Bluetooth links, competing with ARM and Ceva in intellectual property for consumer wireless chips. The IP blocks target Internet of Things designs where some competitors are still fielding low power mobile SoCs.
Semiconductor and IP companies have traditionally focused on performance, reach, and throughput in their wireless devices while shirking power and board space, Chakra Parvathaneni, vice president of Imagination’s wireless group, told EE Times. “We’re trying to bring a 2x or so better power and much more battery efficiency for sleep power. This is a new way that we believe every other chip vendor or connectivity technology vendor will be going as IoT matures.”
The company’s three new IP cores, dubbed Ensigma Whisper radio processing units (RPUs), use a Series5 architecture to integrate Wi-Fi 802.11n (C5400), Bluetooth Smart (C5300), or a combination of the two standards (C5401). The RPUs consist of a cluster of programmable MIPS processors that Imagination officials hope will straddle the line between software-defined chips and heavy hardware acceleration.
Although Imagination did not provide specs on low power, Parvathaneni said Bluetooth Low Energy on a MCU such as the C5300 should operate at sub 8 mWatts during transmission. Imagination’s new Wi-Fi module tends to consume about 72 mW in active receive mode. The Bluetooth/Wi-Fi combo core “is closer to C5400 numbers,” he said.
“We shrunk [wakeup] time by a much larger number [compared to current connectivity chips] and brought down the power it takes to wake up and sleep and so on for faster synchronization…which kind of brings down the power as it ramps up,” Parvathaneni said.
The cores operate at 20 MHz or 40 MHz with a data path of 6 bits or 8 bits. Traditionally these cores run at 80 MHz and 10 bits. Imagination also hopes to improve battery life by a factor of three to four, but didn’t provide details on how.
Big players such as Qualcomm, Broadcomm, and Ceva, and smaller players such as Andes all claim to have the lowest power but don’t provide hard numbers. They generally say consumption varies with the application, which is true, but makes comparisons difficult.
“If you can show power consumption per MHz — that’s credible. The higher frequency of processor speed, the more power you’re gonna consume,” Will Strauss, president of Forward Concepts, told EE Times. “ARM is no slouch. M0, M0+ is probably the benchmark all IP things will be measured by.”
Strauss said DSP IP licenser Ceva is a main contender for wireless comms dominance. The company may have more IP in wireless modems than anyone besides Qualcomm. CEVA will likely be in Samsung’s forthcoming Galaxy S6 and is in every wireless Intel chip, Strauss noted.
“The MIPS architecture is no slouch, it’s just that the previous owners and people who ran MIPS didn’t do a very good job of promoting it,” Strauss said, adding that he expects Imagination’s financial muscle to push the architecture. “[Ensigma] has very credible wireless capabilities. Merging that with the MIPS processor could be a very good approach.”
Imagination’s IP cores are available for licensing and Parvathaneni expects to see products in three to four quarters.
— Jessica Lipsky, Associate Editor, EE Times
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