BY MARC ROBINS

In short recent order, Lucent Technologies and Texas Instruments have made big and bold announcements, introducing new DSPs and chip packages designed to usher in a new age of IP phone development. Since the dawn of the industry, the DSP has been an essential, core, enabling technology — providing an array of functions necessary to the task(s) at hand, including compression, noise suppression, modulation/demodulation, and voice/video recognition, to name a few. You could say that without the DSP, this industry would simply not exist.

In the early days of development, Internet telephony engineers had to “borrow” DSPs that were developed for other telephony applications, such as voice messaging, and through sheer strength of programming extend the DSP’s functions and whatever embedded code and APIs were in use in order to build a solution. Since DSPs are specialized chips that are optimized to do a few things exceedingly fast and well, making any kind of changes above and a little beyond the initial design spec took a lot of time and energy.

Fast forward to the present: Texas Instruments (TI) and Lucent have recognized the huge opportunities awaiting them in the nascent convergence marketplace, and have started to announce and deliver technology that promises to fit developers’ needs like a glove. As the demand for voice/video/data IP-enabled systems and devices grows, the makers of “the chosen” enabling technology will be sitting in the proverbial catbird seat. (Here’s a number that I’m sure has a few vendors salivating: In a January 1999 report entitled IP Telephony Market Implementation Within the Enterprise, Dataquest forecasts the market for enterprise IP phones will grow to 9.2 million in 2004, up from 21,000 in 1998.) While Lucent’s microelectronics operation has long been targeting the voice/fax communications industry, DSP market leader TI has recently seen the light of convergence in a very big way — TI has focused on the CTI and Internet telephony industries as major emerging market segments that it intends to dominate. To Lucent, ADI, and the other building block suppliers out there — “Them’s fightin’ words!”

DESIGN AN IP PHONE IN A WEEK
TI has put in place an impressive VoIP strategy, with a number of brilliant, strategic acquisitions to back it up. TI has been the leader in DSP technology since 1982, and boasts over 30,000 customers in the computer, wireless communications, networking, Internet, digital motor control, and mass storage markets around the world. One of TI’s more brilliant moves has been the recent acquisition of Telogy Networks, an early pioneer and leader in the development of embedded IP telephony communications software, such as its Golden Gateway product. Together, TI and Telogy potentially represent a “one-two punch” to the competition, and based on past experience, they will be a tough team to beat — especially when you take into account TI’s renowned development tools, software and hardware support resources, and huge network of third-party DSP solutions providers.

Recently, TI and Telogy announced a complete DSP hardware and software solution for building standards-based IP phones. LAN-based IP phones are used with IP-enabled traditional PBXs, IP-PBXs, voice-enabled routers, and other IP-based enterprise-based communications servers that in effect serve to replace proprietary PBX station sets. As the market for such communications servers and VoIP solutions grows, so will the demand for the requisite “access devices” — a.k.a., phone sets. With this solution, TI claims that developers can design an IP phone within a week.

Based on TI’s programmable TMS320C5000 DSP family and incorporating Telogy’s Golden Gateway software, this new solution also includes standards-compliant APIs, development kits, and an IP phone reference design. The TI IP phone chipset consists of a DSP-based processor chip and a codec chip. The processor uses TI’s low-power TMS320C54x DSP core integrated with a RISC microprocessor, and includes an integrated dual port 10/100 Mbps Ethernet switch and all other necessary peripherals for an IP phone. The codec integrates wide-band analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters with microphone, speaker, and handset amplifier interfaces, and comes in both single- and dual-channel versions. A high level of integration helps reduce the component cost and component count in an IP phone.

Telogy’s Golden Gateway product is one of the most comprehensive embedded software suites available to develop Internet telephony solutions, including a variety of standards-based packet network protocols and user interfaces for customer applications. Golden Gateway software includes signaling, telephony, protocol processing modules, and network management APIs. The bundled software will consist of all required DSP and microprocessor software including low-bit rate and wide-band vocoders, echo cancellation, and signaling software, along with all embedded microprocessor software including TCP/IP, MGCP, SIP, and H.323 protocols, plus an industry standard Real-Time Operating System (RTOS).

DEVELOPER’S KITS: GET ’EM WHILE THEY’RE HOT
TI is making available a prototype development kit, which allows customers to begin developing their IP phone application software. Once the software is completed, it can easily and quickly be ported from the development platform to the customer’s final hardware because the same APIs will be used for the prototype board and the IP phone chipset. The prototype development board has been available to a limited number of TI customers for their IP phone development activities. Scheduled prices for a complete IP phone solution, including processor, codec, and software run-time licenses, will start at $17 in quantities of 100,000.

LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES’ SINGLE-CHIP INTERNET TELEPHONE SOLUTION
Last May, Lucent Technologies’ Microelectronics Group announced plans to manufacture the first single-chip solution for Internet telephones. TI’s recent announcement is a direct response to Lucent’s “shot across the bow.” Lucent is striving to integrate multiple system-level functions on a single chip, in effect reducing the electronics costs of currently available IP phones and decreasing the number of semiconductor chips typically required for Internet telephones from five to only one.

Lucent claims to have available all the building blocks with which customers can design a customizable single-chip product. Lucent’s solution draws upon Bell Labs extensive digital signal processor (DSP) resources and system-on-a-chip experience, much of which was gained in the design of systems-on-a-chip for the cellular phone industry (more than half of the revenues of Lucent Technologies’ Microelectronics Group were derived from system-on-a-chip technology last year). Initially, however, in order to meet immediate time-to-market needs, Lucent plans to offer a two-chip solution priced under $30 in quantities of 100,000.

The planned architecture for Lucent’s solution involves the integration of 13 electronic functions onto a single chip. The functions include a digital signal processor (DSP1627) core; a microprocessor (ARM 940T) core; a telephone handset analog-to-digital converter (codec); a speakerphone codec; a speaker amplifier; a microphone amplifier; an Ethernet Media Access Controller (MAC); two Ethernet 10/100 megabit per second transceiver interface drivers (PHYs) and a repeater for using a single Ethernet wall jack for both the Internet telephone PC; a Universal Serial Bus interface, which enables a single connection between PCs and peripheral devices such as modems; an Infrared Data Communications Interface; a telephone keypad controller; and liquid crystal display drivers. c

Marc Robins is Associate Group Publisher for INTERNET TELEPHONY AND CTI magazines. His column, Mind Share, appears monthly in the pages of INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine. Marc looks forward to your feedback.

Analog Devices  — the signal processing powerhouse — recently announced a new DSP-based processor that enables a new level of communications capacity for networking and remote access equipment. The market for ADI’s technology is not the IP phone market, as with Lucent’s and TI’s products described above, but rather the devices populating the network edge.

ADI’s IGP, otherwise known by the sexy name of the ADSP-21mod980, is a multifunctional, programmable DSP-based processor that provides single-point access to networks. IGP-based access devices can enable ISPs to become both data and Internet telephony service providers (ITSPs). By using IGP-based access devices, ADI claims that ISPs can save up to 50 percent of their total cost of operation. ADI’s complete solution includes the IGP processor, modem/VoIP software, reference designs, and technical support.

The IGP supports modem, voice, and fax communications, and is designed to replace up to four processors used to send and receive voice and/or data packets, and can perform modulation/demodulation, data packetization, error detection/correction, and compression/decompression. It supports 24 ports, the equivalent of a T1 communications line, and enables the convergence of voice and data networks through a unique ability to configure any port for any protocol.

The IGP also features a universal software package for V.90, K56Flex, V.34, ISDN, Fax (FoIP), and Voice-over-IP (VoIP) protocols. Notably, service providers can enjoy significant cost savings by the flexibility and increased load handling capabilities of ADI’s any-protocol-on-any-port device. Each of the 24 ports on the ADSP-21mod980 is able to independently process different standards.

It’s a safe bet that we’ll start to see IGP-powered solutions appearing soon on the market, from such ADI customers as Ascend, Ericsson, Brooktrout Technology, Mapletree Networks, Digi International, and Franklin Telecom.