WiMAX holds the potential to serve in wireless-data applications ranging from broadband's "last mile" to cellular backhaul to 4G cellular. And highly integrated WiMAX silicon is one key to affordable deployment.
Fujitsu Microelectronics has developed a flexible and versatile WiMAX SOC (system on chip), the MB87M3400, that can be used in both base-station and client applications. The chip fully complies with the IEEE 802.16-2004 (fixed WiMAX) standard, enabling system and equipment developers to deliver leading-edge broadband-wireless products to the market rapidly and efficiently.The Fujitsu IC integrates MAC and PHY functions and supports licensed or license-exempt bands between 2 and 11 GHz. The design relies on two separate RISC engines to manage essential WiMAX functions such as traffic scheduling and packet reprioritization, among others, while allowing additional headroom for user-application software.This double-processor architecture partitions the user interface from hardware time-critical paths to simplify software development by system integrators or equipment makers who want to develop an upper-layer MAC. The lower-layer MAC processor is tightly coupled with the PHY and processes all computationally intensive tasks. To add flexibility, the design team included optional features such as subchannelization. To ensure security, the MB87M3400 uses DES/AES/CCM encryption/decryption engines for the 802.16 MAC privacy sub-layer.
