Lumic Electronics extols virtues of new multimedia processor to venture capitalists

Ottawa-based fabless semiconductor company Lumic Electronics Inc its chip-based system to venture capitalists last week as a way to solve potential bottlenecks in delivering multimedia content to the handset. A presentation of the wireless technology and its business plan was given at the sold out Ottawa Venture Capital Fair at the Chateau Laurier on Oct 26. At the time of deadline, Lumic had not released details of any further financing. The company is developing a multimedia processor that promises to bring near real-time delivery of rich media, such as streaming video, to next generation wireless devices. The technology works by off loading multimedia processing from the core or host baseband processor. Company executives say the MIPS involved in the migration to 3G makes opting into a hardware-based solution more practical and viable as opposed to upgrading a handset’s software, an option being offered by some of Lumic’s competitors. Integrating an additional processor into the wireless device significantly decreases latency. It should also save on battery life. PacketVideo is one of the leaders in this area and several handset OEMs are teaming up with them, says Lise Lafontaine, director of marketing at Lumic. "But they are doing so as a stop gap measure," she adds. While the processor is being developed to work along side the core processor of high-end handsets that are equipped with a camera, it will also work with a variety of next generation wireless devices. Lafontaine told Report on Wireless that handsets equipped with the company’s multimedia processor will be able to encode in real-time using open standards such as MPEG 4 for camera type applications and H.263 in video conferencing. To speed up time-to-market, Lumic licensed some key system-on-a-chip (SoC) memory technology from ATMOS Corp, Kanata ON. "ATMOS’ SoC-RAM provides us with custom memory arrays tailored to meet our specific needs, so that Lumic in turn can meet the low-power consumption and time-to-market requirements of the highly competitive wireless marketplace," Luc Lussier, president/CEO at Lumic, said in a statement. Lafontaine wasn’t able to quantify the time savings, except to say it will be significant. "It’s hard to put in terms of man hours, but basically we would have had to build up an entire team of experts in embedded DRAM. Whereas this way, we can leverage their expertise, have them do the custom modules that we need and then we can do our software around that," she told RoW. Teaming up with ATMOS has also helped Lumic secure manufacturing capacity with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp, the same fab that ATMOS uses for its DRAM macrocells. Lafontaine says partnering with a local firm also makes it easier for the two engineering teams to work together on any design glitches. To get the processors into devices, Lumic is building an extensive marketing team. It will also rely on its senior management’s long standing relationships with major handset OEMs. Its executive ranks are filled with people with impressive backgrounds at major wireless and semiconductor players such as Nortel Networks Corp, Motorola Inc, Philsar Semiconductor and Newbridge Networks Corp, among others. In late September, the company moved into the U.S. market with an office in Phoenix AZ. The new office will be headed up by Jim Mielke who spent 17 years with Motorola. The company’s VP of operations, Steve Farnow, has more than 25 years experience with Hi/fn, Intel and Texas Instruments. "So what we’re doing now is leveraging some of those relationships to get in with the baseband players," says Lafontaine. Lumic hopes to have the multimedia processor taped out by March next year, in time to be integrated with the early 2002 handsets. "That still gives us some time to do any tweeking and any customer specific twists that we need to do," she says. Volume production is slated to begin in early to mid 2002.

Lumic Electronics extols virtues of new multimedia processor to venture capitalists

News | October 30, 2000

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