UK company profile: Frontier Silicon and Toumaz

It has silicon in products from: Sony, Bose, Roberts, Denon, Philips, Panasonic and Pure.

The last one, Pure, is important in the Frontier story because it is a brand of Hertfordshire-based Imagination Technologies – the source of PowerVR graphics processors, owners of processor firm MIPS, and originators of the DAB intellectual property used by Frontier. And Imagination was in there at the start of Frontier.

“I founded Frontier with Imagination Technologies in 2002,” Toumaz CEO Anthony Sethill told Electronics Weekly. “It was fabless and focussing on digital audio.”

Why are we talking to the CEO of Imperial College medical electronics spin-out Toumaz?

Because, late in 2011, founder Sethill left Frontier Silicon. By May 2012, he was CEO of Toumaz. And two months later, smaller Toumaz had bought Frontier.

“Hossein [Yassaie] was on the board of Frontier and a non-exec of Toumaz,” said Sethill by way of explanation – that is Sir Hossein Yassaie, CEO of Imagination Technologies.

Toumaz was an AIM-listed early-stage company with medical technology that was looking promising, Frontier was a functioning fabless chip and module maker. “Frontier Silicon had customers, revenues, a support organisation, and supply chain management.”

Christofer Toumazou, a professor at Imperial College, set-up Toumaz to exploit some RF signal chain technology that combined digital and analogue techniques in a novel way. He remains a non-executive director.

Decisions were made to channel the company’s wireless expertise towards the healthcare market, and a proprietary radio protocol as well as algorithms for medical vital signs monitoring, and silicon to implement them, were developed.

As an aside, it had branched out into DAB radio chips, also based in Imagination Technology intellectual property, and was a major shareholder in Taiwanese DAB RF chip maker Future Waves. According to Toumaz COO Noel Hurley at the time, Toumaz had plans to focus on Internet-connected audio.

After the dust of Toumaz buying Frontier had settled, there were, and are, three companies: Holding company Toumaz Group, with two subsidiaries: fabless wireless/audio chip firm Frontier Silicon, and Sensium Healthcare which developed what was Toumaz’ vital signs monitoring system into SensiumVitals, a hospital-ready system.

“The two operating businesses share finance, core engineering and supply chain, then individually they have specialist engineering, and sales and marketing,” said Sethill. As part of this, a software team has been built-up in Romania.

SensiumVitals

Sensium is marketing SensiumVitals on this premise: in hospitals, the condition of some patients can deteriorate, and early detection of this deterioration means earlier treatment for it and, ultimately, a less costly stay in hospital.

“Today, in general wards, the standard method of taking vital signs is through observation rounds, typically every four to eight hours. SensiumVitals takes measurements every two minutes,” a spokesman for Sensium told Electronics Weekly.

The main part of SensiumVitals is a disposable ‘plaster’ about 15cm across that is stuck to the chest of a patient when they enter hospital. It contains a radio, a processor, and sensors for respiration, temperature and heart rate – together weighing 15g.

“Consumption is less than Bluetooth LE, and it roams like Wi-Fi – as a patch leaves one basestation, it passes to another,” said Sethill. So patients continue to be monitored, even when they move around.

The proprietary basestation is the next part of the system, linking the Sensium protocol to the hospital Wi-Fi network. Free-space range is 30m, and basestations are typically 7m apart.

“A ward of 30 beds needs four to six basestations,” said Sethill. As a rough guide “It is around $10,000 cap ex for the basestations in one ward.” The plasters last for five days – longer than the average hospital stay according to Sensium, and cost something like £35.

Respiration, temperature and heart rate figures are sent to hospital computers which can present them to nursing staff graphically, or raise alarms if figures suggest deterioration.

Applications are expected where ever there is manual patient monitoring. “SensiumVitals is a supplementary tool for the nurse,” said Sethill – so he sees it used in general wards and A&E, but not in Intensive care.

It is in its first year of qualification – with FDA and CE approval – and has been deployed in five sites worldwide, including a Brighton hospital.

Sensium is working with the University of Leicester, with funding from the UK Technology Strategy Board, to add sensors for blood pressure and blood oxygen (‘SpO2’). It also has plans for clinical-grade remote monitoring products for the home.

Sensium with Frontier is also developing a chip for the IEEE 802.15.6NB1 wireless healthcare body area network standard which will operate in the 2.4GHz ISM band, plus an FCC-allocated 2.36-2.4GHz band.

Frontier Silicon

Back with Frontier, its latest DAB chip, the fourth generation, is called Chorus 4. On the same silicon is: RF front-end, baseband logic, application processor and audio DAC. “It is the most integrated DAB chip ever, worldwide,” said Sethill.

The firm’s Chorus chips generally include interfaces for flash card and USB music storage – and Bluetooth too in the fourth generation. Kino 4, a stripped down version of Chorus 4, is purely for DAB radios and does not have these add-ons.

For OEMs, these chips are available with memory and other support components on PCB-based module – called variously Venice and Verona.

Frontier’s DAB plans are about cutting power consumption further to approach that of a synthesised FM receiver. Each generation has got closer, and Sethill predicts they will get very close, although consumption is unlikely ever to be as low as a purely analogue FM receiver.

Beyond this, the firm aims to get a big slice of the ‘connected’ audio cake.

Its Tuscany (Bluetooth/DAB/FM) module provides wireless links and docking between iPhone and Android (Lightning and USB) devices and digital radios.

“The networked audio sector is poised for take-off,” said Toumaz Group. “By 2016, ~70% of new consumer audio devices are expected to be connected.”

The company already produces chips for cloud audio – internet radio for example – and ex-Philips subsidiary Woox (licensee of the ‘Philips’ brand) recently revealed that Frontier’s dual-band 802.11n Venice 6.5 module is providing the Wi-Fi link within Philips SW700M and SW750M wireless loudspeakers, designed for Spotify Connect users – Frontier collaborates with Spotify.

These speakers offer multi-room synchronised wireless audio – formerly a niche market dominated by luxury audio products from the likes of Sonos.

Sethill sees multi-room set-ups becoming more mass-market, and the introduction of more wireless speaker systems that connect direct to the cloud without an intervening smart phone.

Frontier has a multi-room module called Roma with both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wirelesses – Sethill says expect to see more consumer products with both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Inside Roma, the hardware and software technologies that allow wireless stereo, multi-room and multi-channel synchronised playback are jointly dubbed ‘Caskeid’, and have been licenced from, you’ve guessed it, Imagination Technologies.

According to Sethill, stereo wireless speakers with no wire between them is possible: “We can do wireless to each speaker. We have an algorithm that optimises synchronisation and low latency,” he said, adding that wireless headphones are another target for Frontier.

According to the firm, development of the next generation silicon for connected audio is scheduled to be complete in mid-2015.

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