![Ubicom IP5160U IC](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Ubicom_IP5160U_IC.jpg)
Ubicom was a company which developed communications and media processor (CMP) and software platforms for real-time interactive applications and multimedia content delivery in the
digital home
Home automation or domotics is building automation for a home, called a smart home or smart house. A home automation system will monitor and/or control home attributes such as lighting, climate, entertainment systems, and appliances. It ma ...
. The company provided optimized system-level solutions to OEMs for a wide range of products including wireless routers, access points,
VoIP gateways, streaming media devices, print servers and other network devices. Ubicom was a venture-backed, privately held company with corporate headquarters in
San Jose, California
San Jose, officially San José (; ; ), is a major city in the U.S. state of California that is the cultural, financial, and political center of Silicon Valley and largest city in Northern California by both population and area. With a 2020 popul ...
.
History
Ubicom was founded as Scenix Semiconductor in 1996. The company operated under that name until 1999. In 2000, Scenix became "Ubicom," a word derived from "ubiquitous communications".
* April 1999:
Mayfield Fund
Mayfield, also known as Mayfield Fund, is a US-based venture capital firm that focuses on early-stage to growth-stage investments in enterprise and consumer technology companies. Founded in 1969 and based in Menlo Park, California, it is one of S ...
leads $10 million equity investment in Scenix.
* November 2000: Scenix changes its name to Ubicom.
* November 2002:
Intersil
Intersil is an American semiconductor company headquartered in Milpitas, California. As of February 24, 2017, Intersil is a subsidiary of Renesas. The previous Intersil was formed in August 1999 through the acquisition of the semiconductor busin ...
and Ubicom demonstrate world's first 802.11g wireless access point.
* March 2006: Ubicom secures $20 million in Series 3 funding, led by Investcorp Technology Ventures.
* March 2012: Ubicom is taken over by
Qualcomm Atheros
Qualcomm Atheros is a developer of semiconductor chips for network communications, particularly wireless chipsets. Founded under the name T-Span Systems in 1998 by experts in signal processing and VLSI design from Stanford University, the Univer ...
.
Ubicom Submits to Qualcomm
/ref>
Products
As Scenix and Ubicom, the company designed several families of microcontroller
A microcontroller (MCU for ''microcontroller unit'', often also MC, UC, or μC) is a small computer on a single VLSI integrated circuit (IC) chip. A microcontroller contains one or more CPUs (processor cores) along with memory and programmable i ...
s, including:
* The SX Series of 8-bit microcontrollers, a product line which was partially compatible with Arizona Microchip devices and ran at up to 100 MHz, single cycle. This product was eventually sold to Parallax, who continued its production.
* The IP series of high performance media and Internet processors. These devices were designed to act as gateways for streaming media and data over wired and wireless links.
The Scenix/Ubicom processors relied on very high speed and low latency processing to emulate hardware interfaces in software such as interrupt-polled soft-UARTS. This reduced the size of the silicon chip and therefore the cost, but increased the complexity of the software required on the chip.
Ubicom developed its own architecture, the Ubicom32, and a real-time operating system
A real-time operating system (RTOS) is an operating system (OS) for real-time applications that processes data and events that have critically defined time constraints. An RTOS is distinct from a time-sharing operating system, such as Unix, which m ...
(RTOS) for it. For example, the D-Link
D-Link Corporation is a Taiwanese multinational networking equipment manufacturing corporation headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan. It was founded in March 1986 in Taipei as ''Datex Systems Inc.''
History
D-Link Corporation changed its name fr ...
HD Media Router 3000 DIR-857 contains the ''Ubicom IP8000AU'' and the Western Digital
Western Digital Corporation (WDC, commonly known as Western Digital or WD) is an American computer drive manufacturer and data storage company, headquartered in San Jose, California. It designs, manufactures and sells data technology produc ...
WD N900 the ''Ubicom IP8260U'' CPU. The firmware is most probably Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...
-based, maybe even OpenWrt
OpenWrt (from ''open wireless router'') is an open-source project for embedded operating systems based on Linux, primarily used on embedded devices to route network traffic. The main components are Linux, util-linux, musl, and BusyBox. All com ...
-based, rather than Ubicom RTOS-based.
Logging in via telnet on a Western Digital N900, the CPU and uClinux version is known as:
cat /proc/version
uClinux version 2.6.36+ (bouble_hung@apollo) (gcc version 4.4.1 (GCC) ) #1 SMP Fri Apr 12 18:16:22 PHT 2013
# cat /proc/cpuinfo
Vendor : Ubicom
CPU : IP8K
MMU : enabled
FPU : enabled
Arch : 4
Rev : 1
Clock Freq : 600.0 MHz
DDR Freq : 533.0 MHz
BogoMips : 589.82
Calibration : 294912000 loops
Hardware : UbicomIP8K
cpu 0 : thread id - 6
cpu 1 : thread id - 2
cpu 2 : thread id - 3
cpu 3 : thread id - 4
cpu 4 : thread id - 5
#
# cat /proc/interrupts
CPU0 CPU1 CPU2 CPU3 CPU4 Reentrant?
2: 340937 361457 429308 449005 359141 0 UbicoIPI ipi
27: 0 0 399980568 0 0 8216 Ubicom32 ubi32_na
33: 30709990 0 0 0 0 25334 Ubicom32 timer-primary
34: 0 11470112 0 0 0 3743 Ubicom32 timer-cpu
35: 0 0 23060922 0 0 14194 Ubicom32 timer-cpu
36: 0 0 0 41134181 0 56087 Ubicom32 timer-cpu
37: 0 0 0 0 8820184 2088 Ubicom32 timer-cpu
44: 0 0 0 0 0 0 PCIE-MSI aerdrv
58: 0 0 0 0 0 0 Ubicom32 FAN SPEED
60: 0 0 0 0 0 0 PCIE-MSI aerdrv
70: 1 0 0 0 0 0 Ubicom32 dwc_otg, dwc_otg_hcd:usb1
71: 1 0 0 0 0 0 Ubicom32 dwc_otg, dwc_otg_hcd:usb2
82: 0 0 0 0 0 0 Ubicom32 UBI32_SERDES
83: 60986 58900 60267 63509 63382 5056 Ubicom32 UBI32_SERDES 2
92: 0 33996835 0 0 0 0 Ubicom32 wifi1
93: 0 33996835 0 0 0 0 Ubicom32 pciej
94: 0 0 0 31041951 0 0 Ubicom32 wifi0
95: 0 0 0 31041951 0 2 Ubicom32 pciek
so it appears as some sort of low-frequency (600 MHz) multithreaded CPU (5 threads).
References
{{Reflist
External links
Qualcomm (Ubicom) Corporate website
Qualcomm
Electronics companies established in 2000
Electronics companies of the United States
Companies based in San Jose, California
American companies established in 2000