Beceem Communications announced the world’s first full-featured, 65 nanometer, single-chip WiMAX Wave 2 solution. The newest member in Beceem’s industry-leading product portfolio, the BCSM250 is the first to combine a Wave 2 baseband, dual-band radio, memory and power management in a single chip. Housed in an 11mm by 11mm package, this highly integrated solution reduces the power consumption by at least 30% from existing solutions while increasing peak data rates to 40 Mbps, thereby setting a number of new benchmarks for the industry. This combination of small form factor and low power consumption, coupled with Beceem’s proven mobile performance and wide-scale network interoperability finally allows WiMAX to be embedded in virtually any consumer device, thus accelerating its adoption by major carrier and device manufacturers.
“With the introduction of the BCSM250, Beceem continues to set the standard for WiMAX integration, robust performance, and power consumption,” said Shahin Hedayat, CEO and co-founder of Beceem Communications. “With this chip, supporting 40Mbps throughput and hand-off latency of less than 50 ms, the realization of truly Mobile Broadband connectivity is here for all devices ranging from small PC accessories, PC notebooks, mobile internet devices to handsets.”
The BCSM250 is Beceem’s 4th generation of WiMAX chips and the first WiMAX solution to combine a baseband processor, dual-band 2 GHz & 3 GHz radio, memory, power management unit and host interfaces based on 65 nanometer technology in a single chip. This high level of integration includes previously external components such as a USB 2.0 PHY and power management circuits which reduce the total number of components required for a complete Mobile WiMAX subsystem by up to 60 percent. In addition, Beceem has partnered with third-party Front End Module (FEM) manufacturers to further simplify the design and layout of any remaining, external RF-related components. Both these factors translate into significant total solution cost savings and enhanced manufacturability for OEM manufacturers.
In addition to system-level improvements, the BCSM250 also incorporates advances in WiMAX baseband technology. These improvements have been carefully devised as a result of more than three years of field test and actual network deployment experience on the world’s foremost mobile WiMAX networks and interoperability tests with the leading Telecom Equipment Manufacturers (TEMs). Built on top of its full Maximum Likelihood (ML) MIMO decoder, the BCSM250 baseband also incorporates other notable advances such as improved interference cancellation, advanced channel estimation and improved logarithmic likelihood-ratio (LLR) selection. All these improvements combine to provide best-in-class receiver performance of up to 40Mbps MIMO throughput and outstanding sustainable operation at negative signal to noise ratios. These innovations once again lead the industry and set the performance bar that is required for a true, mobile broadband experience.
The BCSM250 is sampling to customers now with production quantities expected to ship in the second half of 2008