Arasan Chip Systems, Inc., a provider of 'System-on-Chip' or 'SoC' Intellectual Property Solutions has announced that its 'Secure Digital Input/Output' or 'SDIO' Host controller IP core solution has been licensed by Sierra Wireless (News - Alert), a provider of hardware, software, and connected services for mobile lifestyles and machine-to-machine communications, for integration into its advanced SoC controller.

The semiconductor industry is currently witnessing an explosive growth in the machine-to-machine or 'M2M' communications market, as ABI Research (News - Alert) predicted that around 200 million M2M devices will have been shipped by the year 2014.

Sierra Wireless offers a wide range of products, such as mobile broadband devices, intelligent embedded modules, gateway routers & service platforms, and the SoC designers at the company needed a scalable, standard bus interface that could help them in adding new functions to their base platform. The SDIO interface, offered by Arasan is based on a standard SD-bus, and meets the requirement of Sierra Wireless.

Additionally, the company provides SDIO Host controller IP core to its customers, which natively processes all standard SDIO commands. The core offers all the enhanced security features of SD, as the SDIO standard supports a wide range of functionality over its interface. The standard is able to interface with removable cards built in the same form-factor as a SD card, while the SDIO controller is able to interface up to seven separate I/O functions and one memory function. To provide a quicker response time when handling multiple functions over the SD bus, the solution features an interrupt mechanism as well.

In order to help the enterprises in rapid integration of SDIO interface IP into SoCs, chipsets and application processors, Arasan offers a comprehensive Intellectual Property or IP solution, which comprises of 'Register Transfer Level' or 'RTL' code, verification IP, software stacks, hardware platforms for development and validation. The company also provides extensive customer support for all its solutions.

According to Somnath Viswanath, Product Marketing Manager at Arasan, the soaring cost of SoC design forces system designers to build standard yet scalable SoC based platforms, and by integrating Arasan's proven SDIO Controller IP core, designers can support different functions on a standard platform based solution with sufficient interface performance to handle the most demanding applications, both today and in the future as well.

In December 2009, Arasan Chip Systems, Inc. introduced SD 3.0 / eMMC 4.4 Card Controller IP that was compliant with the latest SD Memory v3.0 and Multimedia Card eMMC 4.4 specifications. The Card Controller IP also supported transfers up to 104MB/s and incorporated all standard security features.