Peter Van Rooyden and McCail Lotter formed Zyray Wireless in August 2000 to develop an application centric Wireless Processor for next generation mobile devices. The company has received an undisclosed amount of funding from Mission Ventures, EDF Ventures, and Formative Ventures and anticipates additional capital requirements in 12 – 14 months. Zyray has 38 employees and is headquartered in the US with a software team in South Africa.

Zyray Wireless is developing SPINNER, an adaptive and reconfigurable multi-mode (e.g. GSM/GPRS, WCDMA and/or 802.11b) Embedded IP Core for baseband ASICs utilized in wireless mobile devices. SPINNER utilizes multiple, proprietary technologies that enable greater power efficiency, improved QoS, and more efficient use of the radio spectrum.

SPINNER is reconfigurable between multiple air standards. SPINNER can monitor available computational power, signal strength, interfering signals, remaining battery life, bandwidth availability, user profile settings, and the active application requirements and then adapt complex algorithms to reduce power consumption and cancel interfering signals while also improving data transfer rates. The key benefit of this optimization is the direct enhancement of the terminal’s overall power consumption and delivered performance efficiency.

The IP central to the design of SPINNER focuses around 5 key areas: Adaptive Interference Cancellation, Space-Time Processing, Reconfigurable Radio Link Processor, Radio Link Optimizer, and Memory Management System. Zyray has been granted several provisional patents in the area of WCDMA implementation, enhanced memory management, interference cancellation, and security. Additional patents have been filed for inventions pertaining to the radio link processor, interference cancellation, STP implementation and the SPINNER reconfigurable architecture.

Zyray’s patented approach to Adaptive Interference Cancellation minimizes the interference from the local basestation as well as from neighboring cells, resulting in a 6dB SNR improvement in a fading environment. The level of cancellation is determined by a number of external parameters, such as remaining battery life, BER, type of application (voice, data, streaming video), and user service profile. Adaptive Interference Cancellation reduces power consumption and improves QoS (Improved SNR and BER, more reliable hand-offs, fewer dropped calls & wider coverage area).

According to Zyray, conventional time processing techniques such as RAKE receivers, equalizers and error control coding are limited in their effectiveness. Enhanced Space-Time Processing (STP) is emerging as the next generation mobile device solution. Zyray is embedding a suite of STP algorithms into the SPINNER core. A mobile device equipped with this technology can show an immediate 3dB improvement in SNR by utilizing the transmit diversity feature present on most 2G basestations today. As future multi-antenna handsets are deployed, STP lays the groundwork for an order of magnitude improvement in SNR and channel utilization.

Space-Time Processing optimizes the resource utilization and extracts the maximum performance from STP enhanced handsets. This results in an improved Signal to Noise ratio (SNR) and reduced Bit Error Rate (BER), which significantly improves QoS levels, increases data transfer rates and reduces power consumption. Zyray claims to be the pre-eminent leader in these technologies, its members having led R&D efforts for Alcatel and Sony, as well as commercial satellite projects. The lead technical team has authored numerous books and white papers on both STP and adaptive interference cancellation.

The Reconfigurable Radio Link Processor reduces power consumption by solving the real time issues of handling Layer 1/2 functionality and also provides HW/SW efficient support of multiple communication standards (e.g. GSM/GPRS + WCDMA).

The Radio Link Optimizer determines the optimum mix of signal processing algorithms, radio link setup parameters, and application level parameters required to provide the longest battery life for a required level of service. It improves QoS and reduces power consumption via bi-directional management of communication resources to match the application demand.

Zyray’s Memory Management System consists of patented dynamic memory allocation and bit-aligned memory technologies, which enable baseband solutions to operate with a smaller memory footprint and still achieve the performance of a larger memory footprint system. Since memory costs are a significant portion of next generation wireless solutions, Zyray provides memory size savings that translate directly into cost savings.

Individually, each of these differentiators can contribute considerably to improved handset performance, reduced power consumption, and systems cost savings. Zyray can also simultaneously integrate them into a single IP core solution, which provides a significant advantage in the WCDMA & GSM/GPRS market.

Zyray provides a wireless testbench that allows all silicon and software developments to be proven in the context of the entire system. The testbench has the ability to simulate a multi-cell WCDMA network from a protocol and air-interface perspective.

Werner Sievers, President and CEO (most recently CEO of Centera, an international network product development, manufacturing, services and systems integration conglomerate with annual revenues of $500 million)

Pieter van Rooyen, Ph.D., Founder and CTO (Previously Director of the Alcatel Research Unit for Wireless Access (ARUWA). He is a full Professor in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Pretoria. He has published over 60 technical papers, holds 4 technical patents in the area of digital communications and is co-author of 2 books related to 3G mobile systems.)

Michiel Lotter, Ph.D., Co-founder and VP of Systems and Architecture Design (He was a development engineer with Alcatel in South Africa where he led research teams in spread spectrum, CDMA, Software Radio and Broadband Satellite Communications. He is the author or co-author of 4 patents in digital communications and co-editor of 2 books related to 3G mobile systems.)

Ken Lobo, VP of Software Development (previously Senior Director of Engineering at Widcomm)

Michael Civiello, VP of Marketing and Business Development (most recently Marketing Director for Motorola SPS, serving in their Wireless Semiconductor Systems Group)