Ubicom

Last updated
Ubicom
Company typeSubsidiary
FoundedMay 1998
Headquarters San Jose, California, USA
Key people
Teresa H. Meng, founder and director
Craig H. Barratt, President
ProductsEthernet

WLAN Bluetooth GPS Powerline communications Hybrid Wired/Wireless

Location

Contents

Parent Qualcomm Atheros
Website www.qca.qualcomm.com
Ubicom IP5160U Network Processor Ubicom IP5160U IC.jpg
Ubicom IP5160U Network Processor

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.

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".

Products

As Scenix and Ubicom, the company designed several families of microcontrollers, including:

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 

References