From RF power system design to parallel processor arrays, a group of the UK’s most promising chip design companies demonstrate the range of world-class semiconductor design skills in the South West of the country.
Bath design centre
“There is a pool of RF systems, digital pre-distortion and digital/analogue IC design expertise in the Bristol area, and our new office harnesses 
this to help our customers bring to market the most efficient RF transmitter design achievable within their project parameters,” says Tim Haynes, the CEO of Nujira.
The Cambridge-based hardware and software design company has chosen a location near Bath as the site of its new design centre, which focuses on the development of energy-efficient RF transmitters for mobile phone and broadcast applications.
The design centre will be managed by basestation design specialist Simon Whittle who joins Nujira from PowerWave Technologies. He will be supported by a team of specialist engineers offering RF systems, RF power amplifier, DSP and FPGA design skills.
“Simon Whittle and his team are available to work with customers on a consultancy basis to address project-specific design challenges,” points out Haynes.
Nujira originally designed its RF power modulation technology to increase the efficiency of 650W power amplifiers in 3G mobile basestations. It is now working on a lower power version which should reduce cost and improve power efficiency in next-generation 3G LTE (long-term evolution) mobile phones.
International reputation
Analogue and mixed-signal chip company Dialog Semiconductor is quietly building a design team in Swindon that is earning an international reputation.
The skills bar is set high and Dialog is looking in particular for mixed-signal designers with five to seven years’ experience. It would like to find designers with digital skills who are also able to work within the analogue domain.
Software defined silicon
Different chip design skills are needed at Bristol-based fabless semiconductor company Xmos Semiconductor, which has positioned itself in the low-cost consumer end of the semiconductor industry with its first products priced between $1 and $10.
The products have been described as a new type of programmable semiconductor device, referred to as software defined silicon (SDS), which aims to bring low-cost user programmability to the consumer electronics industry. The chips are programmable in C.
Xmos recently introduced its first design kit which allows developers using C to create applications on one of the company’s four-core XS1-G4 chips. Each XS1-G4 has four XCore tiles connected by a high-performance switch, with each tile containing an XCore processor, which is a 400MHz 32-bit event-driven processor.
Like the Transputer, which was also designed in Bristol at Inmos 20 years ago, the SDS architecture is an array of parallel processing cores.
It is an event-driven processing engine with pin control integrated within each core allowing the entire system, including interfaces, to be implemented in software. A core-to-core communications capability allows arrays of Xcores tiles to be built up.
According to Xmos, the market driver for its low-cost programmable devices is a dearth of innovation in the consumer electronics industry. “This is all driven by the cost of state-of-the-art Asics going up,” says David May, chief technology officer at Xmos and professor of computer science at Bristol University. “Designers have to design chips that cover the whole world market. That strangles innovation. Innovation has been squeezed out of consumer electronics.”
Parallel processing
Another South-West chip firm making an impact on a world market is Bath-based wireless start-up Picochip, which has a generic technology based on parallel processing that can address any digital signal processing application. It is currently concentrating on two areas: Wimax and femtocells.
“Picochip is the largest supplier of silicon to the Wimax infrastructure industry and the only supplier of silicon to the femtocell market,” claims Picochip founder and chief operating officer, Peter Claydon.