Octasic expanding reach of wireless products with new low-cost, low-power next-gen base stations

Montreal-based Octasic Inc. is leveraging its early success in the 2G GSM base station space to expand into the broader 3G and 4G wireless infrastructure market with high performance chips that cost less and use less power than competing products. “We believe that the same fundamental technology fits the 3G space as well as LTE. So we’ve engineered a new generation of devices,” Robert Blake, Octasic’s CEO, tells Report on Wireless. “We will be bringing those into the marketplace and will make a technology announcement in the early part of next year.” Octasic’s chips will fill an important gap in the wireless infrastructure sector: a low-cost, high performance base station that consumes significantly less power than the current generation of base stations. Along with its chips, the company is offering an open software development platform on which customers can program the chips for a variety of applications. Next generation networks such as HSPA and LTE will drive huge spikes in data usage from interactive applications such as video and online gaming, which could strain networks using the current generation of chips. Blake says Octasic’s chips can handle the high performance nature of 4G applications because of the way they are designed. “With the migration to LTE all of these issues are going to come to a confluence and that’s why our focus is to deliver these new technologies and to deliver the application software,” Blake says. “Once we demonstrate what we can do with this technology it will become very apparent to the end customers what advantages that they can get in terms of power, and heat savings in terms of their products, as well as the fundamental costs.” Putting Octasic chips into other markets Octasic also has eyes for sectors unrelated to wireless, such as medical imaging and the military. Blake says any industry where there is high-bandwidth signal processing and low power requirements is an ideal fit for his company’s chips. Medical imaging, specifically 3D ultrasound scanners, will become more prevalent in the future as the population ages. These portable devices require a tremendous amount of signal processing power and, since they run on batteries, will need to consume very little power. But don’t expect Octasic to go on a hiring spree to secure the knowledge to develop products for these markets. “We absolutely don’t have the expertise, nor do we ever plan to build a team of engineers that are experts in that space,” Blake says. “But we will use external third parties and we will enable our customers to take advantage of our core technologies for some of those adjacent markets.” Video customer service calls Even though Octasic is pushing hard on the wireless front, the company got its start in the voice game, helping to connect the varying types of networks together. It is now leveraging that legacy to enable high-quality video communications on both wired and wireless platforms. One of the more interesting services to come from using Octasic’s chips is the video-enabled call centre, or Interactive Voice and Video Response (IVVR), where the agent responds to questions and queries during a live video session. The service is also available over smartphones. “Instead of just giving you the capability to hit those dial keys based upon voice instructions, now you’re going to physically see video, text overlay, pictures, animations on the phones that will enable to you make selections whether it’s a banking service, an airline service or whatever that might be,” Blake explains. Interest in this type of application has come primarily from Korea so far, but Blake expects this type of service, where a call centre would handle hundreds, if not thousands of video calls daily, to be in demand in several markets internationally. Perry Hoffman is an Ottawa-based freelance writer. He can be reached at perry@messagingmechanics.com.

Octasic expanding reach of wireless products with new low-cost, low-power next-gen base stations

News | November 2, 2009

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