Fujitsu Microelectronics Commercially Releases WiMAX Chip

Fujitsu Microelectronics America Inc. yesterday at Broadband Wireless World in Las Vegas announced the commercial availability of its WiMAX system-on-a-chip (SoC), following on the heels of Intel Corp.’s WiMAX chip release on Monday.

The MB87M3400 SoC, which complies with the IEEE’s 802.16-2004 standard, is designed for use both in base stations and in end user devices in licensed or unlicensed bands below 11GHz. It comes in a 436-pin BGA package and pricing begins at $5 each in 1,000-unit volumes. A complete reference design also is available and is scheduled for certification by the WiMAX Forum.

The chip was codeveloped by Fujitsu Microelectronics America and Wi-LAN Inc. The two companies have been working together on WiMAX technology since late 2002. Wi-LAN contributed its knowledge of systems and its orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technology during the development Fujitsu’s SoC.

The chip itself took more than a year to create, says George Wu, director of marketing, technology solutions/ASSP at Fujitsu Microelectronics America. “This is probably the most integrated SoC you can see today,” he adds.

Fujitsu began sampling its chip with its partners in January of this year “and it worked the first time,” says Wu.

Aperto Networks, Wi-LAN, and ZTE Corp. are among the systems vendors building products based on the Fujitsu SoC. Aperto and ZTE also are using the Intel chips.

For example, Aperto is using the Fujitsu SoC for its business-grade CPE and base stations and the Intel chip for its consumer-grade CPE.

The Fujitsu SoC uses an OFDM 256 PHY that supports channels from 1.75MHz up to 20MHz and can operate in TDD or FDD modes, with support for all available channel bandwidths. (In TDD, or time division duplexing, just one channel is used for upstream and downstream. FDD, or frequency division duplexing, uses one channel for upstream and a separate channel for downstream communications.)

Of course, the bandwidth a WiMAX solution can offer varies depending on the channel size, reach and other variables. However, using 64QAM, a 20MHz channel and all 192 subcarriers, the SoC can offer a data rate of up to 75mbps.

The SoC also has a RISC engine with 802.16 upper layer MAC, scheduler, drivers, protocol stacks and user application software. Also on the board is a secondary RISP/DSP that acts as a coprocessor to handle lower-layer MAC functions.

John Seliga, vice president of marketing at Wi-LAN, emphasizes the MAC function of Fujitsu’s SoC is an important feature, adding that competitor Wavesat’s chip “is more of an ASIC – no MAC.” MAC controls how CPE communicate with one another via the base station, he says, to poll the CPE and control commitment bandwidth and other variables. “In a multipoint world,” he says, “this is crucial.”

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