Ubicom
Ubicom was a 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.
| Type | Subsidiary |
|---|---|
| Founded | May 1998 |
| Headquarters | San Jose, California, USA |
Key people | Teresa H. Meng, founder and director Craig H. Barratt, President |
| Products | Ethernet
WLAN Bluetooth GPS Powerline communications Hybrid Wired/Wireless Location |
| Parent | Qualcomm Atheros |
| Website | www.qca.qualcomm.com |
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".
- April 1999: Mayfield Fund leads $10 million equity investment in Scenix.
- November 2000: Scenix changes its name to Ubicom.
- November 2002: Intersil and Ubicom demonstrate world's first 802.11g wireless access point.
- March 2006: Ubicom secures $20 million in Series 3 funding, led by Investcorp Technology Ventures.
- March 2012: Ubicom is taken over by Qualcomm Atheros.[1]
Products
As Scenix and Ubicom, the company 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 continued 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 firmware is most probably Linux-based, maybe even OpenWrt-based, rather than Ubicom RTOS-based.
Logging in via telnet on a Western Digital N900, the CPU and uClinux version is known as:
cat /proc/version
uClinux version 2.6.36+ (bouble_hung@apollo) (gcc version 4.4.1 (GCC) ) #1 SMP Fri Apr 12 18:16:22 PHT 2013
# cat /proc/cpuinfo
Vendor : Ubicom
CPU : IP8K
MMU : enabled
FPU : enabled
Arch : 4
Rev : 1
Clock Freq : 600.0 MHz
DDR Freq : 533.0 MHz
BogoMips : 589.82
Calibration : 294912000 loops
Hardware : UbicomIP8K
cpu[00] : thread id - 6
cpu[01] : thread id - 2
cpu[02] : thread id - 3
cpu[03] : thread id - 4
cpu[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).