
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
Digital usually refers to something using discrete digits, often binary digits.
Businesses
* Digital bank, a form of financial institution
* Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) or Digital, a computer company
*Digital Research (DR or DRI), a softwa ...
. The company provided optimized system-level solutions to OEMs for a wide range of products including wireless routers, access points,
VoIP gateway
An analog telephone adapter (ATA) or FXS gateway is a device for connecting traditional analog telephones, fax machines, and similar customer-premises devices to a digital telephone system or a voice over IP telephone network.
An ATA is often ...
s, streaming media devices, print servers and other network devices. Ubicom was a venture-backed, privately held company with corporate headquarters in
San Jose, California
San Jose, officially the City of San José ( ; ), is a cultural, commercial, and political center within Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area. With a city population of 997,368 and a metropolitan area population of 1.95 million, it is ...
.
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
Mayfield, also known as Mayfield Fund, is a US-based venture capital firm that focuses on early-stage to growth-stage investments in enterprise and consumer technology companies. Founded in 1969 and based in Menlo Park, California.
History
The ...
leads $10 million equity investment in Scenix.
* November 2000: Scenix changes its name to Ubicom.
* November 2002:
Intersil
Intersil is an American semiconductor company headquartered in Milpitas, California. , Intersil is a subsidiary of Renesas. The previous Intersil was formed in August 1999 through the acquisition of the semiconductor business of Harris Corpor ...
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
Atheros Communications, Inc., was an American computer networking company independently active from 1998 to 2011. It produced semiconductor chips for network communications, particularly wireless chipsets. The company was founded under the nam ...
.
Ubicom Submits to Qualcomm
/ref>
Products
As Scenix and Ubicom, the company designed several families of microcontroller
A microcontroller (MC, uC, or μC) or microcontroller unit (MCU) is a small computer on a single integrated circuit. A microcontroller contains one or more CPUs (processor cores) along with memory and programmable input/output peripherals. Pro ...
s, including:
* The SX Series of 8-bit microcontrollers, a product line which was partially compatible with Microchip
An integrated circuit (IC), also known as a microchip or simply chip, is a set of electronic circuits, consisting of various electronic components (such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors) and their interconnections. These components a ...
PIC microcontrollers
PIC (usually pronounced as /pɪk/) is a family of microcontrollers made by Microchip Technology, derived from the PIC1640 originally developed by General Instrument's Microelectronics Division. The name PIC initially referred to ''Periphera ...
and ran at up to 100 MHz, single cycle. This product was eventually sold to Parallax
Parallax is a displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different sightline, lines of sight and is measured by the angle or half-angle of inclination between those two lines. Due to perspective (graphica ...
, 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
A real-time operating system (RTOS) is an operating system (OS) for real-time computing applications that processes data and events that have critically defined time constraints. A RTOS is distinct from a time-sharing operating system, such as Unix ...
(RTOS) for it. For example, the D-Link
D-Link Systems, Inc. (formerly Datex Systems, Inc.) is a Taiwanese multinational manufacturer of networking hardware and telecoms equipments. It was founded in 1986 and headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan.
History
Datex Systems was founded i ...
HD Media Router 3000 DIR-857 contains the ''Ubicom IP8000AU'' and the Western Digital
Western Digital Corporation is an American data storage company headquartered in San Jose, California. Established in 1970, the company is one of the world's largest manufacturers of hard disk drives (HDDs).
History
1970s
Western Digital ...
WD N900 the ''Ubicom IP8260U'' CPU
A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor, or just processor, is the primary processor in a given computer. Its electronic circuitry executes instructions of a computer program, such as arithmetic, log ...
. The firmware is most probably Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
-based, maybe even OpenWrt
OpenWrt (from ''open wireless router'') is an open-source project for embedded operating systems based on Linux kernel, Linux, primarily used on Embedded system, embedded devices to Router (computing), route network traffic. The main components ...
-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 0 : thread id - 6
cpu 1 : thread id - 2
cpu 2 : thread id - 3
cpu 3 : thread id - 4
cpu 4 : 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).
References
{{Reflist
External links
Qualcomm (Ubicom) Corporate website
Qualcomm
Electronics companies established in 1998
Defunct computer companies of the United States
Companies based in San Jose, California
American companies established in 1998
Defunct computer hardware companies
Defunct semiconductor companies of the United States
Defunct networking companies
Networking hardware companies
Networking companies of the United States