VLSI TECHNOLOGY: VLSI demonstrates market's first AMR vocoder

VLSI Technology will demonstrate its AMR (Adaptive Multi-Rate) vocoder at Europe's CeBit in Hanover, Germany. VLSI is the first vendor to demonstrate to the market the new AMR voice codec, which will be used in forthcoming GSM phase 2+ phones, as well as in the future UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications Standard) and W-CDMA (Wide band CDMA) third-generation standards.

The new AMR vocoder will allow operators to improve their network capacity as well as their quality of service. The improved capacity and quality of the vocoder has also led standardization organizations to choose the AMR vocoder for the UMTS and W-CDMA standards.

The AMR implementation supports all transmission modes (12.2kbit/s down to 4.75kbit/s) specified by the ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) specification GSM 6.70 version 7.00. Implementation has been achieved within less than a month of ETSI's algorithm release. The Vocoder has passed all ETSI test patterns and is immediately available to customers for implementation in VLSI silicon.

The AMR voice codec is implemented on VLSI's enhanced Oak+DSP architecture and will be provided as part of VLSI's GSM-OneC single-chip offering, as well as forming part of custom solutions for GSM and third-generation standards.