Upcoming generations of WiMAX chipsets from NextWave will provide advanced platforms on which to develop next-generation WiMAX mobile-terminal and infrastructure products. The company has announced a strategy to release WiMAX chipset families in two product generations through the first half of 2008. The chipsets are intended to improve performance, reduce power consumption, and enable new types of advanced multimedia applications. According to Adam Gould, senior V.P. of product development at NextWave, the greatest value for WiMAX is in the deployment of media-based services.

The chipsets will also allow seamless operation and roaming across worldwide WiMAX frequencies and profiles. In addition, the chipsets incorporate key features to accelerate the convergence of mobile wireless devices with consumer electronics products across Wide Area Network (WAN) and Local Area Network (LAN) environments.

These WiMAX chipsets span multiple applications. However, each chipset is comprised of a baseband system-on-chip (SoC) and a matched multi-band RFIC.

The first generation (NW1000) of WiMAX chipsets is comprised of the NW1100 WiMAX baseband mobile subscriber SoC and its matched multi-band RFIC, the NW1200. Key features are: support of the IEEE 802.16e standard; support of PCI and SPI host interfaces; the support of RF channel bandwidths from 1.75 MHz to 20 MHz; and the use of a highly integrated direct conversion RFIC architecture.

The direct conversion architecture first down converts the raw WiMAX signal to baseband. The baseband signal is then sampled by an ADC at approximately 80 MHz. The two crucial capabilities that contribute to the success of this architecture are image rejection enabled by advanced filters, and (more importantly) extremely fine resolution (about 5 Hz) in the frequency synthesis of the local oscillator used for the down conversion mixing.

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