Jennic has reported a five-fold increase in sales of its semiconductor intellectual property (IP) licenses in the first half of the year.

The big drivers are the Sheffield-based fabless chip company’s comms and basestation-related technologies including the RapidIO system-level IP products, FEC and ATM-SAR cores.

“The communications sector has been showing strong growth with basestations turning to high-performance digital signal processing in response to increased demand for high-bandwidth mobile data communications,” said Jim Lindop, CEO of Jennic.

A typical application for the RapidIO core, which is designed into system-on-chip devices, is to connect multiple DSP cores in cellular basestations.

“Licensing RapidIO IP, allows companies to achieve a significant performance boost, and a fast entry into the high-performance market, whilst lowering design overhead and risk,” said Lindop.

Jennic works with Asic and FPGA suppliers such as IBM, NEC and Altera. “IBM has recently shipped silicon for a client’s 65nm basestation communications Asic containing the Jennic SRIO,” said Adrian O’Connor, sales director, IBM Microelectronics.

NEC has licensed technology from Jennic for the past 3 years.