User:Poemtech/SiConnect

Summary
SiConnect Limited was a venture-backed fabless semiconductor company that was founded in the UK in 2005. It developed semiconductor integrated circuits for in-home power line communication. Its first product, the PLT050, was received back from the foundry in April 2007 and was ready for customer sampling in July that year. However, rather than invest further to fund the business while it took the product to market, the company's investors were variously unable or unwilling to provide further finance. After a predictably unsuccessful attempt at selling the business to other companies within the same market area, the company was put into an insolvent administration in January 2008. The assets were purchased by one of the company's customers and Poem Technologies Co Ltd was then created in China to revive the product, primarily addressing commercial opportunities in the Chinese market. It is unclear whether Poem Technologies intends to develop SiConnect's original product roadmap or just to exploit the current working product.

Unique approach to Powerline Communication
SiConnect's "POEM" technology (an acronym created from the phrase "POwerline EMpowered") was a unique approach among the competing powerline solutions. Without exception, all other solutions are based on a combination of CSMA and TDM (time division multiplexing) techniques. These techniques were developed for purer networking mediums such as Ethernet. SiConnect's contention was that in a "messy" medium such as powerline, the overhead cost of these techniques outweighed the advantages. The company believed that bandwidth in a powerline network is a scarce commodity best used for applications and not for the network control plane. The company also believed that the future home network will need to easily manage multi-media content rather than internet traffic distribution, requiring that the network should support quality of service intrinsically, whereas other solutions did not cater adequately for QoS.

POEM used a MAC based on Synchronous Multiple Access and Contention Resolution (SMA/CR). SMA/CR granted instant access to the network for high priority traffic (overcoming a drawback of TDM and thereby implementing priority-based QoS at the lowest level of the MAC). Priorities of competing transmission attempts were assessed prior to transmission beginning, which resulted in bandwidth-wasting collisions being avoided.

SiConnect believed that the use of SMA/CR was preferable to TDM/CSMA combinations for two key reasons. First, because it allowed multiple network applications of differing content types to be deployed by the user without any network or application configuration being necessary (SMA/CR in effect allows the home network to be created ad hoc). Second, because the sophistication of the MAC provided much more efficient usage of the available bandwidth, allowing a simpler (and hence cheaper) PHY to be implemented in the silicon devices, which in turn allowed powerline connectivity to be available to a lower-cost class of consumer electronic appliances than was otherwise possible.

SiConnect's competitors argued that their style of approach was well established in the market place and that the ad hoc approach of SMA/CR made it difficult to guarantee that any one application would obtain sufficient bandwidth to operate effectively. Although these observations were felt to have merit, SiConnect was led by its target customers in the audio and VoIP communities who had been unable previously to engage with powerline technology suppliers because of a too-high cost point and a lack of QoS.

SiConnect's technology was considered unique and notable within the powerline community, and was the subject of substantial appraisal by several trade journals. It was also incorporated into the IEEE P1901 proposed standard for co-existence between non-interoperable powerline technologies.