[September 6, 2000]

Scenix Embedded Communications Controller Used In Valcom's Voice Over IP System

Scenix, a provider of solutions for embedding the Internet, announced that its SX Series communications controller has been designed into the V-8000-IP voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) system family recently introduced by Valcom, Inc., of Roanoke, Virginia.

The Valcom system allows voice to be transmitted over a digital network, such as an Ethernet or proprietary local area network (LAN) in an office, industrial or school environment. The V-8000-IP is intended to increase the capabilities of Valcom's paging and other internal communications products by taking advantage of the LANs that are becoming almost universally available within buildings.

Adding voice to packet networks requires an understanding of how to deal with system-level issues, and the ability to implement that understanding. Valcom has developed considerable expertise in silence suppression, echo cancellation, and other technologies related to transmitting voice within non-ideal environments.

"With virtually every school, factory, and business in the world now being wired for the Internet or with some LAN, we saw an opportunity to apply our expertise to a system that would let users send voice over those networks," said Tom Hoover, Valcom's Program Manager. "The system, though, had to be the most cost-effective, smallest form factor solution possible, which is why we chose the Scenix communications controller chip as the heart of our implementation. At its price point, it has the highest level of performance in the industry, which lets us do in software functions that would otherwise have taken several external devices or required an expensive ASIC. In addition, its 'software system-on-a-chip' design methodology let us complete the development in one-fifth the expected time."

Within the V-8000-IP, a Scenix SX52BD communications controller containing the SX-Stack TCP/IP networking protocol software modules provides connection to a digital network, and also performs overall system control functions. It accepts compressed voice data from a DSP, encapsulates it, and outputs it to an Ethernet chip for transmission over the network.

Stephan Thaler, vice president of marketing at Scenix, said, "Everyone is familiar with transmitting data over voice networks using modems, but sending voice over a digital system is an entirely different thing, requiring the ability to digitize and process voice streams using self-contained software building blocks. We're very excited that Valcom has successfully combined its extensive knowledge of voice transmission with our silicon and software network connectivity capabilities to develop a solution that accomplishes what is a very difficult task."

The Scenix approach to embedding the Internet is based on its SX-Stack, a complete TCP/IP network protocol stack that is implemented as real-time Virtual Peripheral modules, which are software implementations of functions that are normally done in hardware. The SX-Stack modules are used to create Web servers and e-mail appliances, and can be combined with interface modules from the on-line Scenix Virtual Peripheral software library to build a complete Internet connectivity solution.

The Virtual Peripheral modules are downloaded into the on-chip flash program memory of a Scenix SX Series communications controller to configure the controller for a given application. The SX Series runs at up to 100 MHz and executes most program instructions in a single clock cycle, delivering up to 100 MIPS (million instructions per second) of computing power.

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