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Icera's filing of an antitrust complaint against Qualcomm in Europe has put the software defined modem approach in the spotlight, but another UK-based start-up is also chasing the dream of the flexible handset. Cognovo, set up last year to commercialize technology originally developed at ARM, is showing its first product.

The company - based, like ARM, in Cambridge - was founded by the former executive team of TTPcom, a handset software stack company acquired by Motorola. Cognovo says its SDM (Software Defined Modem) product will reduce the cost of making mobile devices and will "change the rules" for next generation development, especially for 4G handsets. It claims the "world's leading handset manufacturers" are now testing its offering, which should appear in commercial phones in 2012.

"Rapid evolution of mobile broadband services such as music download, video streaming and social networking is driving modem requirements harder than ever," Cognovo said in its statement, and gained support from ARM's CEO Warren East, who commented: "We are delighted with the rapid progress made by the Cognovo team and look forward to seeing end products using the platform."

The industry has discussed software defined and cognitive radio techniques for years, as a way for devices to support several different networks in software, making it cheaper and easier to upgrade handsets when infrastructure changes, or to create low cost products that can move between different networks, automatically choosing the best connection according to various criteria such as signal strength or cost. Many high profile projects, like Intel's Digital Radio, have ensued, but the technology has been hard to drive down to commercial cost levels until recently. Software defined techniques have been pioneered in particular in the UK, in the Cambridge R&D community and at companies like Icera and, on the base station side, picoChip.

Cognovo says the key benefits of its software centric design are "greater flexibility, halved costs and size, and time to market reduced, all without compromising power consumption." It claims multimode development time could be cut by 9-12 months, important at a time of shrinking handset lifecycles and a very varied pattern of operator upgrades to HSPA, HSPA+ and LTE.

Analyst Will Strauss, president of chip research firm Forward Concepts, commented: "The SDR concept has been around for a while, but with the move to HSPA and LTE a more flexible approach is becoming essential."

The SDM platform consists of a Modem Compute Engine (MCE); a licensable processor subsystem, the SDM operating system, and a fully integrated development suite. It leverages a technology called the Ardbeg Vector Signal Processor, spun out from ARM six months ago. It is targeted at LTE Category 4 and previous standards, with one engine supporting W-CDMA, HSPA, HSPA+, LTE and WiMAX.

Gordon Aspin, CEO of Cognovo, added: "Our platform for LTE handsets is a ground-up design, not just a re-targeting of a legacy product; and the MCE is more than just a processor, it's a platform solution for SDM."

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