Fujitsu Microelectronics America announced at the WCA conference this week that MiTAC Technology Corp., a broadband wireless ODM based in Taiwan, will use the chipset maker's WiMAX system-on-chip (SoC) to build its customer premises equipment.

Joseph Huang, general manager of MiTAC USA, said in a statement, "We will use the Fujitsu WiMAX SoC and customize the WiMAX solution by adding the features required to meet various market needs."

The increasing participation of ODMs like MiTAC in the WiMAX market is expected to help bring down the cost of WiMAX gear as certified solutions become available. "MiTAC is a world leader in the electronics manufacturing industry, having strong design and cost-efficient manufacturing capabilities. We are confident that MiTAC’s efficiency and expertise will bring the cost down to make WiMAX CPEs more affordable and available," said Keith Horn, senior vice president of Fujitsu Microelectronics America.

The Fujitsu MB87M3400 uses an OFDM 256 (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) PHY that supports all the available channel bandwidths from 1.75 MHz to 20 MHz, and can operate in TDD or FDD mode. A programmable frequency selection function generates the sample clock for any desirable bandwidth. When implementing the 64 QAM in a 20 MHz channel and using all 192 sub-carriers, the SoC’s data rate can potentially go up to 75 Mb/s. Uplink sub-channelization is also supported.

The Fujitsu WiMAX SoC incorporates sophisticated processing power, including a powerful main RISC engine that implements the 802.16 upper-layer MAC functions, scheduler, drivers, protocol stacks and user application software. A secondary RISC/DSP functions as a co-processor, which executes the lower-layer MAC functions, offloading processing from the upper-layer MAC and enhancing the total SoC performance. A multi-channel DMA controller handles high-speed transactions among agents on a high-performance bus.