April 24, 2012 -- S3 Group (formerly Silicon & Software Systems, Ltd.) today announced that it has partnered with Cognovo, Ltd. to provide system-on-chip (SOC) design services alongside Cognovo's Modem Compute Engine IP for software defined modems in order to accelerate time-to-market.S3 Group initially collaborated with Cognovo to create its CDC160 Software Defined Baseband SOC on Samsung's 45-nm CMOS process technology.

The SOC designed by Cognovo and S3 Group is already in use by companies developing software modems for a wide range of wireless communications standards including WiFi, 3G W-CDMA, HSPA+, LTE and LTE Advanced.

The S3 Group contribution to CDC160 ranged from the development of complex digital blocks and full system-on-chip integration and verification to physically implementing the design in silicon. S3 Group's design, integration and implementation services were delivered on-time and against a very aggressive schedule.

"S3 Group's input to the SOC design, verification and advanced low- power implementation of the CDC160 SOC enabled Cognovo to focus on our core competencies, and ensure we were delivering a market-leading solution," said Gordon Aspin, CEO of Cognovo. "We were impressed with how S3 Group took pro-active responsibility for translating our high-level requirements into a robust design. It demonstrated a high degree of flexibility and maturity, ensuring that the program was always first priority and proved to be the right choice of partner for us on this project. Based on this shared experience we agreed to partner going forward to accelerate our customers' design-ins of Cognovo's Modem Compute Engine within their larger SOCs."