Upzide, Tensilica,

Upzide Expands Business Relationship with Tensilica, Developing Multi-Core VDSL2 Modem Chipset

News Release from: Tensilica
09/01/2008

UpZide Labs AB and Tensilica, Inc., today announced an expanded business relationship under which UpZide will take their reference Vectorized VDSL2 (second generation Very high-speed Digital Subscriber Line) design to market in a chipset using over 50 Xtensa LX2 configurable processors. Vectorized VDSL2 technology is seen as key to delivering VoIP (voice over Internet protocol), VoD (video on demand) and HDTV (high-definition television) simultaneously over standard telephone lines.

“Our unique scalable architecture is built on multiple Xtensa processors,” said UpZide’s CEO, Dr. Mikael Isaksson. “The programmable nature of this platform allows for efficient future upgrades, compliance to standard enlargements, customizations and customer niche optimizations for both control plane (firmware) and data plane (transceiver). It also allows us to use an advanced system simulation environment to ensure end-to-end system validation quality.”

Upzide’s solution builds on the existing and continued roll out of FTTN (fiber-to-the-network) VDSL2 deployment by significantly increasing both data rates and reach over the existing copper network and providing operators with an economically and timely alternative to FTTH (fiber-to-the-home). UpZide believes its Vectored VDSL is the next step in large scale broadband roll-outs. Vectoring overcomes the performance limitations of VDSL2 with a capital expenditure that is several multiples less than required for FTTH in brown-field deployments, making it the solution of choice for operators as they increase their offering of value-added services.

“UpZide’s team has strong expertise gained from designing several VDSL platforms in various semiconductor technologies, including FPGAs, ASICs and DSPs, since 1995, stated Steve Roddy, Tensilica’s vice president of marketing. “As we’ve worked together over the past two years, UpZide has found that our Xtensa configurable processors are ideal for this project because they can be optimised precisely for this application. This makes them much faster and energy efficient than standard control processors, enabling UpZide to design a processor based solution with the power-area efficiency previously only attainable with hard-coded RTL design methodologies.”