French chipmaker Sequans, announced an investment from Motorola today along with an agreement with Alcatel to supply the vendor with WiMAX chips for customer premise equipment in India and other emerging markets.
According to RCR Wireless News:
Though Sequans didn’t come right out and say that Motorola will use its WiMAX chips as it launches WiMAX handsets, it’s logical to expect Motorola to do just that, and possibly more. Sequans claims its 802.16e-2005 chip, the SQN1110, draws a mere 350 milliwatts of power and delivers throughput of more than 10 megabits per second. The company said its SQN1110 was designed to exceed WiMAX Forum Wave 2 certification and should be available early next year.
But the company also makes chips for base stations, both fixed and wireless, and with Motorola’s “substantial” investment in Sequans, it wouldn’t surprise anyone if Motorola tapped Sequans for WiMAX chips for its Wi4 portfolio.
Sequans has said its chips will be built into PC cards manufactured by MiTAC, but primarily the company is aiming to land its chips in handsets. Intel Corp. is expected to dominate the WiMAX chip market for laptops.
Meanwhile, Alcatel announced that it’s planning to use Sequans’ mobile WiMAX chips in its CPE in India beginning in the second quarter of 2007 as part of Alcatel’s Broadband for All program.
Alcatel is aiming for wide-scale deployments of WiMAX and expects that Sequans’ technology will help the company get low-cost devices into the hands of consumers quickly.
Motorola has invested large sums of money into Clearwire and was front and center as a vendor of choice as Sprint Nextel announced it’s WiMAX network plans.
Intel’s WiMAX Connection 2250 is a low-cost system-on-chip that supports IEEE 802.16-2004 and IEEE 802.16e-2005.
[...] Sequans and Motorola are teaming up. Sequans says its SQN1110 was designed to exceed WiMAX Forum Wave 2 certification and should be available early next year. [...]
Left by dailywireless.org » Beecem: Wave 2 on December 4th, 2006