Hellosoft's VoIP software suite runs on ARM core

Hellosoft's VoIP software suite runs on ARM core
BANGALORE, India — Hellosoft Inc. (San Jose, Calif.), a software intellectual-property provider with a development center in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, has readied a voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone software suite that's optimized to run on a single ARM926EJ-S core from ARM Ltd.

The software bypasses the traditional system architecture that uses two processors for a VoIP phone, thus reducing the time-to-market and cost for Internet phones, the company said.

ARM (Cambridge, England) demonstrated a software reference design implementing the phone suite, including the voice codec and protocols running on the Linux OS, at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco last month.

VoIP systems with both a RISC microprocessor and a DSP need separate memories, peripherals and buses, raising end product costs. The two processors also need different code development environments, HelloSoft and ARM said.

The ARM and Hellosoft solution implements all VoIP functions, including codecs, line echo cancelers, and telephony components and signaling stack on a single ARM926EJ-S core running Linux. The companies said the optimized solution was powerful enough to implement two channels of voice for VoIP phones and other products.

The platform "represents a major step forward in assisting OEMs and ODMs in significantly reducing the cost and complexity of developing VoIP phone systems," said Denise Kerstein, network- ing-segment manager for ARM. "This solution will also benefit other types of products that will integrate VoIP as a service, such as cellular phones and integrated access devices."

The HelloVoice software reference design includes G.711, G.726 and G.729AB vocoders, a G.168-2000 line echo canceler, voice activity detection, comfort-noise generation, jitter buffer and packet loss concealment.

Also last month, Hellosoft announced a family of software-based configurable wireless LAN solutions for Texas Instruments' TMSC6416 DSP, comprising the complete physical layer and protocols for 802.11 wireless-LAN standards. The solution, which is licensable to semiconductor vendors and OEMs, is fully customizable, so developers can specify the hardware and software partitioning of their target platform.