SOC provider joins alliance

Essensium NV, a fabless provider of low-power systems-on-chip, has joined the Wavenis Open Standard Alliance as a participating member, enabling it to influence the voting committees as the first semiconductor member while continuing its partnership with Coronis SAS to complete Coronis's first Wavenis-compliant SOC.

Wavenis is a leading 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, which now manages its technology roadmap and standardisation. Wavenis is currently installed in more than four million devices in the field around the world.

The core of the technology is its power-optimised wireless communications protocol with sub-GHz RF transceiver.

In October 2007, Coronis joined forces with Essensium to develop a high-performance, low-power transceiver that meets both Wavenis specifications and Coronis designs.

The first production batch of silicon has left the foundry as the start of a large production order.

Essensium optimised the Coronis wireless transceiver architecture and merged it with a low-power 32-bit RISC microprocessor into a single SOC. The embedded RISC controller runs an RTOS and the Wavenis communication protocol stack, while 1 MB of embedded memory is available for program code and data.

The Coronis SOC is going to replace the current two-chip 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.