| Type | Public (NASDAQ: MSPD) |
|---|---|
| Industry | Semiconductors |
| Founded | 2003 |
| Headquarters | Newport Beach, California, USA |
| Key people | Raouf Y. Halim (President, CEO) |
| Products | Wireline and wireless network semiconductor technologies |
| Revenue | $178 million USD (2010) |
| Operating income | $23 million USD (2010) |
| Employees | 542 (2010) |
| Website | www.mindspeed.com |
Mindspeed Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: MSPD) designs, develops and sells semiconductor solutions for communications applications in wireless and wireline network infrastructure markets.[1]
Contents |
Mindspeed’s semiconductor portfolio is classified into three product families: communications convergence processing (CCP), high-performance analog (HPA) and wide area networking (WAN) communications.
Mindspeed’s ARM-based processing solutions include ultra-low-power, multi-core digital signal processor system-on-chip (SoC) solutions for fixed and mobile (3G/4G) carrier infrastructure and residential and enterprise platforms. The company’s analog product portfolio includes high-density crosspoint switches, optical drivers, equalization and signal-conditioning solutions that solve switching, timing and synchronization challenges in next-generation fiber optic communications, Optical Transport Network (OTN), enterprise storage and broadcast video transmission applications. The legacy WAN communications portfolio includes carrier Ethernet devices, Layer 2 processors, T/E carrier devices and symmetrical DSL solutions.
Mindspeed launched the Transcede® family of wireless baseband processors[2] in 2010, including the single-core Transcede 3000, which serves the eNodeB processing needs of a picocell, while consuming less than 10 watts (W) of power, and the dual-core Transcede 4000, which delivers three sectors of LTE processing for macro cells serving thousands of subscribers. The Transcede 4000 integrates 26 programmable processors into a single device,[3] including two ARM® Cortex A9® multi-core symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) reduced instruction set computer (RISC) processors, 10 CEVA (digital signal processors (DSPs) and 10 DSP accelerators, enabling equipment manufacturers to fully support the complete processing needs of single- and multi-sector base stations using the wideband code-division multiple access (W-CDMA), LTE, LTE time-division duplex (TD-LTE, in China), time division synchronous code division multiple access (TD-SCDMA, in China) and/or WiMAX air-interface standards.
The Transcede 4000 processor was honored as the Best Mobile Technology Breakthrough at the 2010 Mobile Excellence Awards.[4]
Mindspeed Technologies was formed from the spin-off of the Network Access division of Conexant Systems, Inc. to shareowners on June 27, 2003; creating two independent, publicly traded communications semiconductor companies.[1]
Conexant Systems was established four years earlier when Rockwell International spun off its Rockwell Semiconductor Systems (RSS) division[5] to shareholders as an independent company focused exclusively on providing semiconductor products for communications electronics. The Network Access division (which became Mindspeed) helped to develop and commercialize 56kbps client-side and central-site modem technology in the mid- to late-1990s that was used to deploy dial-up Internet access services offered by Internet Service Providers (ISPs).[1]
As an independent company, Mindspeed used its experience in analog and mixed-signal communications semiconductor technology to create multi-core packet-processing devices for Voice over IP (VoIP) gateways, routers and other communications systems.