Intel Develops Mobile WiMAX Chipset

Intel Corp. moved one step closer to developing its own mobile WiMAX solution on Wednesday when the company announcing it had completed the design of its first WiMAX baseband chipset for use in laptops and other mobile devices.

According to Intel's executive vice president and chief sales and marketing officers Sean Maloney, the new WiMAX Connection 2300 is a combination of the company's new chipset design and the previously announced single-chip, multi-band WiMAX/Wi-Fi radio.

The chipset design was demoed on Wednesday during Maloney's keynote at the 3G World Congress and Mobility Marketplace in Hong Kong, where he showed a Centrino Duo mobile laptop with mobile WiMAX (IEEE 802.16e-2005), Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11n), and high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) 3G capabilities successfully accessing the Internet at broadband speeds over a mobile WiMAX network.

According to Dave Hofer, director of wireless marketing for the mobile platforms group at Intel, the announcement of Intel's WiMAX Connection 2300 will help further speed the deployment of mobile WiMAX, which is already moving along at a steady pace he said.

"Our aim with WiMAX is to provide personal anytime/anywhere broadband connectivity," said Hofer. "This is a step along the way. We're at a point where, in 2007 and 2008, you're going to start seeing product samples."

Sprint Nextel has announced plans to build the first nationwide mobile WiMAX network by the end of 2008. Intel, who is helping to build Sprint's WiMAX infrastructure, says that its testing and validating timeline will correspond with the cellular industry's network rollout.

"Standards ratification, infrastructure, it's all moving along at a good pace," Hofer said. "We believe that WiMAX is going to be a cost-effective and appealing multi-megabit service for delivering mobile content."

Intel says that it added multiple input/output (MIMO) functionality to its baseband chip to amplify the signal quality and throughput of wireless bandwidth. The company also said the chip will use the same software for Intel's WiMAX and Wi-Fi solutions in order to help ensure unified management for connectivity.

With the design of the Connection 2300 chipset now complete, Intel says it now plans to sample the chipset in both card and module forms will begin in late 2007.

[original post: www.hitech-news.info]