Intel brings WiMax chips in volume to market — MobileMonday Global: Industry News

^{Broadband wireless shipping in volume} Intel brings WiMax chips in volume to market

20 Apr 2005 at 04:14 GMT MobileMonday Staff

Intel has announced volume shipments of its WiMax Rosedale chip. Equipment vendors including Alvarion, Proxim, Redline and ZiMax have all announced agreements to use Intel silicon in products based on the IEEE 802.16-2004 standard that Rosedale deals with. Redline will launch its RedMax line of customer premises equipment - a product with an outdoor antenna and an indoor box with connections for phone and broadband data service. It will cost less than USD 500. Intel is not the first chipmaker to announce WiMax silicon, but its impact will felt since it is ready to put marketing dollars behind the technology. The next major step for WiMax will be product certification and inter-operability testing by the WiMax Forum. Industry observers expect 802.16-2004 products, designed to deliver wireless broadband, to be tested by the forum in the summer and hit the market some time before the end of the year. Rosedale is a “system on a chip” for customer premises devices that would send and receive data from a base station that could be several miles away. The chip includes a MAC (media access control) component for the IEEE 802.16-2004 standard, a “phy” (physical interface) element that uses OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing), an integrated 10/100Mbit/s Ethernet MAC for a home or office LAN, and a TDM (time-division multiplexing) controller interface to support voice and streaming data. WiMax will compete against DSL and cable modem services. Intel and others think that larger opportunity lies in IEEE 802.16e, a standard still under development that will allow for WiMax services to mobile devices such as notebook PCs. That technology is expected to hit the market in 2007 or 2008.