The concept of replacing hardware functionality with software does have prior art. Dialup computer modems and MPEG video decoders are two common commercial examples. However, the recent availability of powerful and cheap host processing power enables the software modem concept to be seriously considered for mainstream CE applications.

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Note also that today’s CE devices now often feature a secondary processing resource such as a graphics processing unit or multimedia processor in addition to the central host processor to address high-definition video playback and 3D gaming. Software modems also can take advantage of the availability of such secondary processors to relax host processor loading.  

Mirics is now shipping in production a commercial software modem implementation, and other companies are working on commercializing software modems for CE applications. As its first step in delivering wireless convergence, Mirics has implemented broadcast TV and radio reception on portable PCs utilizing a software demodulator to support reception of multiple broadcast standards.

Broadcast is just the tip of the iceberg of how software modems can be employed. Thanks to the software modem’s flexibility, other wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, and WiMAX all conceivably can be implemented as a single reconfigurable RF front end, with software-defined basebands.

Thought must be given to analyzing various wireless use cases. But even if more than one RF path must be implemented on the analog front end to support parallel radio operation, such as broadcast and Wi-Fi, a software approach can still deliver cost and size savings by obviating the need for multiple digital basebands.

Chet Babla, marcom director, has more than 17 years of semiconductor marketing and IC development experience in RF and mixed-signal ICs. Prior to Mirics, Babla held product marketing positions at Frontier Silicon and Phyworks and IC development roles at Conexant, Nortel Networks, and GEC-Plessey Semiconductors. His professional experience has covered mobile TV, digital radio, optical communications, and digital telephony. He graduated from the University of Huddersfield with a degree in electrical and electronic engineering in 1992.

Although cellular radios can also be integrated with these wireless technologies, it is more likely that the various 2G to 4G cellular technologies will become a software modem subset in their own right due to the complex resource-intensive application software and type approval requirements for cellular receivers.

As consumer demand for communications convergence and multimedia content consumption on ever-shrinking CE devices continues unabated, a new technology approach will be needed to meet functionality and cost goals. The software modem is a very real solution.