Abilis Systems was founded in 2004 by a team of former Motorola SPS employees to develop single chip CMOS solutions for OFDM-based radio communication standards, including mobile TV receivers and high speed Internet access transceivers. The company's mission is "to design, market and deliver adaptive wireless communication chips for mobile consumer terminals."

Since July 2005, Abilis has been a member of the Kudelski Group (www.nagra.com), a leader in digital security technology and the digital Pay-TV industry. The Kudelski Group is traded on the Swiss Stock Exchange (SWX "KUD"). Abilis actively cooperates with Nagravision to propose more secure and fully featured conditional access solutions to mobile TV operators. Abilis has also set up strong links with the EPFL (Swiss Institute of Technology) and CSEM (Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnologies).

OFDM modulation techniques have been selected in numerous wired and wireless standards such as WiFi, WiMax, UWB, DVB, DAB/DMB and xDSL. Applying the concepts of Software Defined Radios to OFDM-based communication standards, Abilis is addressing emerging OFDM applications with a reconfigurable core, combining the flexibility of a DSP approach and the efficiency of a dedicated logic implementation. Abilis chips have also adopted the best of Cognitive Radio technology. They are able to monitor their environment and adapt their behavior accordingly, in order to recover the best quality signal at the minimum power consumption.

Abilis claims to be first company to propose a single-chip mobile TV solution, integrating both the RF tuner and the demodulator. The company has developed a true single chip solution that combines a complex RF design and a multi-core baseband.

The AS-101, the company's flagship product, is a highly integrated RF SoC for Mobile Digital TV reception, compliant with the DVB-T and DVB-H standards. The device provides a complete solution from the antenna to the MPEG transport stream data and the IP datacasting services. The device has a direct conversion RF architecture and supports multiple RF bands (VHF, UHF, US L-band), has high sensitivity with robust and adaptive processing, is immune to interferers in urban environment, and works "on-the-move."

The AS-101 is able to adapt to the received signal conditions, choosing the appropriate processing complexity to minimize power consumption. Using two AS101 chips in parallel, an efficient antenna diversity system can be implemented to guarantee an optimum solution on the move.

With a DSP-based approach, Abilis has the flexibility to select the most appropriate algorithm under any circumstance, and in particular to recover weak signals in a noisy environment or compensate for the Doppler effect. Its AGC approach to coping with interferers provides a 20dB advantage over classical solutions, according to the company. An external LNA provides outstanding sensitivity and allows the LNA to be placed close to the embedded antenna.

A proprietary DSP was designed from scratch with low power objectives in mind, and is 4x smaller than industry-standard DSPs with the same processing power, according to the company. The main instructions required by the OFDM processing are executed in one cycle. MPE-FEC error correction improves performances on-the-move, even without antenna diversity. With the burst reception of DVB-H, the chip can be switched off most of the time. The single chip device is housed in a chip scale package, requires few external components, and reuses the phone clock.

IBM Microelectronics will manufacture Abilis' mobile digital TV chips on a 90nm RF CMOS process for the cellular phone, portable media player, and PC laptop markets. As part of the agreement, Abilis will add its RF clock synthesizer into IBM's IP portfolio. Abilis has also licensed S3's low power ADC IP in 90nm CMOS process and will incorporate it into first generation single-chip mobile TV applications.

Because the architecture is reconfigurable, the initial plans are to support DVB-T and DVB-H standards, with a roadmap to WiFi, T-DMB and WiMax according to market requirments.

Yves Mathys, CEO
Alain Duret, CTO
Eric Gouze, Head of Business Development