Ensigma Communications IP Cores

The number of communications standards for broadcast and connectivity continues to expand and fragment, as HD TV, digital radio and mobile TV demands higher bandwidth content in new broadcast standards alongside existing standards. In addition, there is an unstoppable trend towards connectivity – through Wi-Fi and other bi-directional systems – to connect every product to the internet. It is therefore highly desirable for device manufacturers to increase flexibility and future-proofing while minimizing risk by using a multi-standard solution for both broadcast and connectivity communications.

Imagination Technologies' Ensigma™ UCCP IP platforms are a unique range of low-power solutions enabling the reception of a wide range of analogue and digital TV, mobile TV, and digital and analogue radio broadcast standards, as well as Wi-Fi and in future other connectivity standards, on a single device.The UCC™ engine at the heart of every UCCP IP core is fully programmable, enabling the user to load only the standards they need, and the highly optimised code implementing each standard delivers class-leading performance at the lowest possible power consumption. They provide a uniquely optimized balance of programmability and hardware configurability, yet occupy equivalent or less silicon area than hard-wired, single-standard demodulation solutions in the market.

The Universal Communications Core (UCC) is at the heart of all of our Ensigma communications products. The latest version of this is our Series3 architecture, which features transmit as well as receive capabilities, support for diversity and multiple concurrent algorithm execution, and multiple SCP inputs. This unique architecture comprises four principal engines:

SCP (Signal Conditioning Processor)

Configurable hardware that enables a wide range of IF, low IF and zero IF tuners to be connected to UCC. The SCP accepts sampled digitized data, mixes it down to baseband if required, resamples it to the system baud rate and performs front-end filtering and other signal conditioning to deliver consistent, high-precision complex data samples to the demodulation processor. It is the SCP that makes the UCC very easy to integrate with a wide range of RF receiver solutions.

MCP (Modulation Control Processor)

The MCP delivers the unrivalled flexibility of the UCC. A complex vector processor with multiple parallel execution units, the MCP is fully programmable using low-level microcode, to enable demodulation of almost any analogue or digital modulation standard as well as WiFi (802.11a/b/g initially) and other connectivity standards. This is all achieved with the same silicon engine, using comparable silicon area to other single standard solutions. And with Series3 architecture, the MCP can also implement a wide range of transmit paths as well as receive paths – again all within one engine. Using a highly parallel architecture, the MCP is capable of processing real-time channels up to very high data rates while maintaining low power levels, giving the headroom to support future generations of even more advanced broadcast and communications standards.

TXP (Transmission Processor)

The TXP is a multi-mode hardware engine that adds forward error correction data and performs IQ mapping of transmit data. Any ODFM modulation is subsequently performed by the MCP.

ECP (Error Correction Processor)

The ECP provides high-performance hardware viterbi, Reed Solomon and other error correction and coding engines. By performing these functions in reconfigurable hardware, exceptionally low levels of power consumption are achieved while delivering very high real time data throughput.

 Download UCCP310 Overview Factsheet