ATLANTA-PrairieComm Inc. last week introduced itself to the wireless industry with a big splash by announcing agreements with two industry heavyweights-Qualcomm Inc. and Motorola Inc.
The three-year-old company, which has chosen to remain relatively quiet until now, provides systems design components, including digital signal processing embedded software, application specific integrated circuits and radio-frequency design services for the wireless digital voice and data industry.
PrairieComm’s worldwide licensing agreement with Qualcomm allows it to develop, manufacture and sell Code Division Multiple Access-based ASICs to Qualcomm’s subscriber equipment licenses for digital cellular, personal communications services and wireless local loop applications. CDMA will round out the company’s technology capabilities for digital cellular and PCS markets.
PrairieComm said it will use the same “system-on-a-chip” design technology it currently uses in its Time Division Multiple Access and Global System for Mobile communications products to offer wireless subscriber equipment manufacturers a single-chip CDMA baseband ASIC solution. The company said it plans to make a CDMA ASIC product available by mid-year.
“The cdmaOne air interface has tremendous momentum around the globe, and there’s a substantial demand for baseband ASIC devices,” said PrairieComm President John Dichl, who founded the company in 1994. “PrairieComm has been developing advanced CDMA products for over two years and is excited to be in a position to bring this technology to market.”
PrairieComm’s agreement with Motorola is designed to provide GSM equipment manufacturers with rapid time-to-market, flexibility and lower costs, said the company.
Motorola will offer its customers a power DSP core-based platform with specialized logic blocks required to accelerate specific GSM functions, said the companies. The platform will be built from Motorola’s DSP 56300 family of digital signal processors.
PrairieComm will offer to license customers its Inner-G GSM intellectual property, optimized to take advantage of Motorola’s DSP core-based platform, said the companies. PrairieComm’s Inner-G technology combines DSP firmware and embedded software to perform the modem, vocoder and call processing functions required at the lower layers of the GSM air interface, said PrairieComm.
“The combination of PrairieComm and Motorola products will offers customers a powerful platform from which to develop faster, smaller and less expensive base station equipment for the next wave of GSM infrastructure products,” said Thomas Farmer, vice president of worldwide marketing at PrairieComm.
“We see this as a first step in providing infrastructure customers with platform solutions across a variety of wireless standards.”
Based in Arlington Heights, Ill., PrairieComm is focused on providing products and service with wired and wireless applications, including digital cellular, PCS, digitalTV, satellite communications and WLL.
