Dec 8 2009
Essensium N.V., a fabless provider of low power Systemon- Chip (SOC) solutions, today announced it has joined the Wavenis Open Standard Alliance (Wavenis-OSA), as a Participating Member, enabling them to positively influence the voting committees as the first semiconductor member, all the while continuing its partnership with Coronis S.A.S. to complete Coronis' first Wavenis compliant SOC.
Wavenis is a leading edge wireless technology platform that was originally developed by Coronis to address the needs of Advanced Metering Infrastructures, wireless sensor networking and other M2M applications. In June 2008, Coronis gave the specification of Wavenis to the Wavenis-OSA (royalty-free), who now manages the Wavenis technology roadmap and standardization activities. Wavenis is currently installed in more than 4 million devices in the field around the world. The largest Wavenis network in operation covers 100,000 nodes and is the largest of its kind. The core of the Wavenis technology is its power optimized wireless communications protocol combined with an advanced sub-GHz RF transceiver.
In October 2007 Coronis joined forces with Essensium to develop its next generation wireless silicon platform. Essensium has a strong background in developing wireless low power System-on-Chip devices and used its expertise to develop a high performance low power transceiver that meets both Wavenis specifications and Coronis stringent design requirements. After extensive design and testing phase, a first production batch of silicon has already left the foundry as the start of a large production order.
Laurent Maleysson, Managing Director of Coronis stated: “Thanks to the professional collaboration between our two teams, Essensium is helping us to successfully deliver the first Coronis Wavenis compliant SOC. This is a major step for us and will serve as the cornerstone for all our future offerings in target markets such as smart metering, home & building automation, alarm & security, industrial, environment, smart cities, medical, UHF track & trace and more.” Essensium power optimized the Coronis wireless transceiver architecture and merged it with an innovative low power 32-bit RISC microprocessor into a single SOC solution. The embedded RISC controller runs a RTOS and the Wavenis communication protocol stack, while 1Mb of embedded memory is available for program code and data. This new Coronis SOC is going to replace the 2-chip current platform and its multitude of discrete components, resulting in a higher performance, lower cost and smaller form factor module to better fit a wide variety of metering and non-metering applications in a very competitive wireless landscape.
Johan Danneels, the CEO of Essensium, said: “With the successful implementation of Coronis´ first Wavenis-enabled SOC, we see the opportunity and importance of taking a strategic position as a key player in the market and within the Wavenis-OSA, with the ability to influence Wavenis technology ensuring that semiconductor technological capabilities are adequately taken into account."