Sierra Semiconductor Corp, San Jose, and National Semiconductor Corp, Santa Clara, have jointly announced a chip set for Digital European Cordless Telecommunications equipment. The chip set consists of two chips from Sierra and four from NatSemi. The Sierra chips perform the signal and speech processing of the system, handling all the burst mode logic functions specific to the Digital European Cordless standard, along with scrambling, encryption, error correction, G.721 ADPCM transcoding and analogue speech processing. The NatSemi chips integrate the Radio Frequency, Intermediate Frequency, synthesiser and baseband functions of a DECT system. The companies claim that the chip set reduces the number of RF parts required by more than 200, compared with non-integrated designs. It thus improves portability, as well as lengthening operating times. The two chip sets interface at the Advanced Radio Interface-1 which defines the signalling protocol between the radio receiver and the digital processing portions of a DECT system. The chip set is currently in pre-production; high volume production is due to begin any day now. In quantities of 1,000, the chip set will cost $31.75.
