Ubicom
Ubicom was a San Jose, CA-based 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
Ubicom (and as Scenix) 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 continues 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).