News and New Products

Reference design adds support for mobile WiMax

By Maury Wright -- EDN, 10/17/2005

WiMax news will be abundant in the near term as the WiMax World conference (www.wiMaxworld.com) kicks off in Boston next week. Companies are getting a jump-start on the proceedings, rolling out new WiMax products. Sequans Communications just announced its first WiMax SOCs (systems on chip) targeting both base-station and subscriber equipment. Meanwhile, picoChip moved to add mobile-WiMax support. The market leader in chips for the base-station side of the WiMax equation, picoChip just added support for the coming mobile flavor. Although the fixed-flavor of WiMax is starting to find success in places in which DSL or cable broadband don’t prevail, the bigger opportunity for WiMax may be in the mobile flavor (see “WiMax wireless broadband: Fixed-flavor questions abound, mobile lurks,” EDN, March 31, 2005, for background. Because the picoChip PC102 that WiMax base stations use is essentially a programmable DSP, the company has been able to add support for 802.16e and the Korean-developed WiBro mobile flavor through changes in the software stack. The result is a new PC6530 reference design and perhaps the first shipping support for mobile WiMax.

Sequans, meanwhile, announced the S-Cube WiMax software stack, which supports both the new SQN1010 for subscriber modems and the new SQN2010 for base stations. This duo features space-time coding, diversity combinations, full subchannelization, and automatic repeat request. The chips support channels as wide as 28 MHz.

picoChip, www.picochip.com.

Sequans Communications, www.sequans.com.