The WiMAX wars have officially started as the two biggest chipset vendors for the emerging broadband wireless access standard have both released their first batches of silicon powering the new technology. While Wavesat was officially the first vendor to bring its chipset to market, Intel and Fujitsu are the two heavyweights that are expected to push their separate system-on-a-chip, or SOC, solutions into the mainstream OEM community.

Intel made the biggest splash with its announcement of the PRO/Wireless 5116 customer premises equipment (CPE) chip a week ahead of its competitor, but Fujitsu's rather awkwardly named MB87M3400 is already turning heads. Although Intel created a very scalable chipset designed for mass-market devices — a market it will surely dominate in, given the breadth of its vendor partnerships — Fujitsu's own chipset is being lauded as a wireless workhorse, which not only fits into more robust business gateways but because of a separate processor interface also can be configured for a base station.

That development is key because it allows a much larger vendor community into the WiMAX world and a much faster deployment of equipment because of its almost plug-and-play versatility, said George Wu, director of technology solutions for Fujitsu Microelectronics America. The Fujitsu SOC incorporates its own Media Access Control (MAC) and a self-tuning radio controller that will support any available channel bandwidth between 1.75 MHz and 20 MHz on either split-channel frequency division duplexing or single-channel time division duplexing modes. The chipset also incorporates all analog circuits, radio control functions and even security layers.

While many of Fujitsu's more established broadband wireless access customers will likely disable aspects of the SOC in favor of their own in-house modules, the chip is designed to let vendors that haven't developed their own MAC or security or radio control functions jump right into the market, Wu said.

“Many of our customers can design these components on their own, but they might just take the whole thing from us,” Wu said.

Fujitsu has already landed its first customer, which plans to use the chipset in its basestation. Aperto has said it will use the SOC in its basestation while using Intel's PRO/Wireless chip in CPE.

But Fujitsu has more plans in store for this particular batch of silicon. While Fujitsu is pursuing its own WiMAX mobility chip, based on the IEEE 802.16e specification, for release in late 2006, the vendor is planning to incorporate some elements of that next-generation chipset into future releases of the MB87M3400. While it won't by any means be a full 802.16e-compliant release, the upgrade will add portability to the mix, Wu said.

Like all of its WiMAX counterparts, Fujitsu is awaiting official WiMAX Forum certification this summer. But Wu said the SOC reference design has already been submitted for certification, and while the chipset is available to customers now at $45 a pop, Fujitsu will begin shipping in volume in late summer or fall after completing interoperability and certification trials.