ECC/AHA Announce TPC Chip Availability

Cleveland, OH - November 1998 - Advanced Hardware Architectures (AHA) and Efficient Channel Coding (ECC) today announced the introduction of Forward Error Correction (FEC) integrated circuit technology based on ECC’s Turbo Product Codes (TPCs).

The first product in a planned family of TPC solutions, the AHA4501, is available for sampling and evaluation by qualified users with production units slated for the first Quarter of 1999. The AHA4501 is a single-chip TPC encoder/decoder that operates at encoded rates of up to 36 Mbits/sec.

According to Dr. Pat Owsley, Chief Operating Officer for AHA: “The flexibility of the TPC architecture will enable us to design products targeted toward a diverse array of market segments, including: satellite communications, wireless local and wide area networks, wired communications such as gigabit Ethernet and xDSL, point to point terrestrial data links, LMDS, telemetry and instrumentation data links, cellular, and Wireless Local Loop systems. Since TPC technology is based on block codes, it is likely that the codes will be useful for data storage products as well”.

“Turbo Product Codes perform significantly better than the Turbo Convolution Codes at high code rates” said Dr. Bill Thesling, President of Efficient Channel Coding, Inc., AHA’s partner in the development of TPC technology. “As a result, Turbo Product Codes, as implemented in AHA’s 4501 are better suited to real world applications where maximizing data throughput in a bandwidth limited channel is important”.

TPC technology was developed by Efficient Channel Coding, Inc. (ECC) of Orange Village, Ohio. ECC has patents pending on Turbo Product Code technology. In addition, AHA and ECC have a continuing partnership for the development of coding and communications technology.