Zucotto to play major role in Java applications in wireless market

Zucotto Wireless Inc, Ottawa and San Diego, has taken dead aim at delivering streaming video to the handset by developing products for both the application layer and the device level. The company has released a kit that gives developers the tools to design high-bandwidth applications for the mobile environment. Later this year, it will release sample quantities of the next generation of its flagship product, the Xpresso chip, that will enable mobile devices to run these types of applications. Its first commercial product, the WHITEboard software development kit (SDK), was unveiled at the company’s open house in Ottawa last week. It gives developers a head-start in designing high-bandwidth applications for cell phones, PDAs and other types of mobile devices. They can create and test applications for these devices in a non-embedded environment, independent of hardware availability. Key to the SDK is its Java capability, the Internet-friendly programming language that was designed to shuttle applications from device to device. It is also the first development kit that enables developers to extend Bluetooth functionality to wireless Java application development. Java in the handset isn’t a new concept. The founders of the nearly one-year old company, formerly known as Zucotto Systems Inc, worked on a project developing just that with Nortel Networks Corp about three or four years ago. Project Europa, as it was called, wasn’t much of a success, says Zucotto president and CEO Mark Wells. The end product was too big, too slow and used too much power and memory. "It’s easy to mistake a clear vision for a short distance," he told Report on Wireless. "They had a clear vision, but unfortunately it was going to take a few years before Java was really ready for the embedded world." Early last year, two technological advancements helped bring Java to the handset closer to reality. Semiconductor manufacturing reached new levels of density and computing power, and Sun Microsystems created a software application that translated Java into another language making it run faster. But Zucotto envisioned a time when that translation software would no longer be needed, and the Java code would become embedded directly on the chip. This would dramatically increase the speed at which Java applications could run. To put Java at the device level, the company’s engineers have stripped away all of the traditional software layers needed to run Java-based applications and embedded the code directly on its Xpresso chip. Commercial release of the new chip is expected within the first half of next year, says Zucotto CTO, Dariusz Otreba. While he wouldn’t reveal details of which foundry the company would be using to manufacture the chips, he did say that multiple foundry sites would be used to guarantee a continued supply. Selling chips and IP cores key to market strategy "What we envision is taking our chips and our cores which is basically our chip design, our intellectual property and bringing either those chips into products or working with manufacturers of cellular phones and other devices to bring our microprocessor core, our Java microprocessor into their silicon," Wells told RoW. On the Bluetooth side, Wells says, there may be an even larger opportunity. "We’re actually making a microprocessor and most Bluetooth designers are starting from scratch and there’s no (standard) architecture," he says. "In that sense, they can take our chip as the main chip in the device." Eventually, selling its chips and licensing its IP cores to manufacturers will make up the bulk of the company’s revenue. The cellular phone business potentially represents a huge opportunity for Zucotto, but Wells recognizes that "integration is the name of the game at the end of the day." Corporate infrastructure built on solid ground In the last few months, the company has filled out its management team to complement the strengths of its founders. And Wells says that the majority of them come from some heavy hitting companies in the wireless market citing Nortel, Qualcomm, Wireless Knowledge, Motorola, Ericsson, Mitel, among others. "If you pick all the major wireless companies, we pretty much have somebody from everyone of them," he adds. The company expects SDK sales will contribute the lion’s share of projected revenues of $40 million for 2001. Chip sales will just be beginning to ramp up during that time frame. Wells says Zucotto will proceed slowly, rather than introducing hundreds of development kits and then running into support problems. "There’s no sense rushing it," he says. "We have four or five trade shows coming up in the September, October, November time frame and we’re ramping up our support functions and the whole infrastructure of the company. So at that time, we can have a large variety of products from the very basic product, which is a free download to the more sophisticated products."

Zucotto to play major role in Java applications in wireless market

News | September 5, 2000

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