Cards utilizing the Mwave technology have an Mwave Digital Signal Processor (DSP) on board. The Mwave DSP was jointly developed by the Mwave Alliance Partners of IBM, Texas Instruments, and Intermetrics. When combined with the mwaveOS (an onboard preemptive multitasking operating system) a variety of functions can be achieved. The Mwave technology can combine telephony and audio functions on a single card for example 28.8K data/14.4K fax modem, telephone answering machine (TAM) and 16-bit CD quality audio functions.

Two of the biggest attractions of the Mwave system are concurrency and software upgradeability. Concurrency refers to the ability to run more than one Mwave task at the same time in a system with only one Mwave based card. So even though your computer has only one card which handles both modem and audio functions you can simultaneously use the modem and play music. The previous Mwave DSP ran at 17MIPS. Each Mwave task uses a finite amount of the Mwave DSP resources and once all the resources are consumed you cannot run any additional Mwave tasks. The currently announced Mwave DSP2000 series can run up to 33MIPS (although for cost reasons currently available boards run up to 25MIPS) to achieve a greater level of concurrency.

Software upgradeability refers to ability of the Mwave DSP to be software upgraded to new and improved functions without the need to replace the hardware. For example when some of the Mwave based cards were originally introduced they were capable of v.32bis (14.4K) data modem. These cards are now capable of acheiving V.34 (28.8K) simply by installing a new piece of software. Also as new software is developed you will be able to use your Mwave card for new functions such as text-to-speech translation and voice recognition.

Because Mwave based cards share a common Mwave DSP and mwaveOS, software can be developed which will work on all Mwave based cards making this an attractive platform for devlopers.

A Bit of Mwave History

The following is courtesy of Malcolm Ware from Team Mwave.

The first Mwave DSP architecture was designed in 1979 in Zurich, Switzerland, in IBM's research lab. The architecture was modified some by an advanced development group in Raleigh in 1980 and the first hardware implementation of the architecture was done in 1980. At age 18, I started working part time (co-op student) on debugging this first piece of hardware and programming it. We even got one of IBM's first PCs a year later to hook up to the prototype. The prototype cost about $10,000 and was on wire-wrapped boards. Some of the first microcode I wrote (I've written about 100,000 lines of Mwave microcode) in the 1981 time frame is running today in the answering machine of our products.

Mwave has a rich and varied history, and has been implemented in various forms and various products through the years from disk drives, to modems, to Rolm telephony products, and only in 1991 did it break into the PC business with some of our first board level products like the SPC card in IBM Japan for speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis. In 1993, IBM made its first announcement of a product, with the DSP chip named Mwave. It was the WindSurfer card. You are right that the name Mwave was only coined in recent years. However, it was born in 1979.

There is much more to tell. If Mwave's success continues, I'll write a book some day. I will say that two major strands of DSP architecture came from design engineers moving between major companies. Today, the Motorola 56xxx family and the TI TMS320C3x family both have roots based on the Mwave DSP, and its first implementation by TI for us in 1982. At the time when the intellectual property aspects of the first Mwave DSP ran out, the TMS320C3x was announced by TI. A key engineer from TI went to Motorola, and the Motorola 56xxx family was born.