Qualcomm today said it is buying orthogonal frequency division multiplexing innovator Flarion, signaling that the world’s leading CDMA technologist may be considering OFDM as the basis for its future mobile technology migration plans.

Qualcomm has agreed to pay the handsome sum of $600 million in cash for Flarion, a significant price considering the vendor has yet to launch a commercial network with a Tier 1 vendor. But the buzz around Flarion has been intense for the last several years as its proprietary Flash-OFDM technologies promises performance, capacity and mobility surpassing other current generation broadband wireless and 3G technologies.

While several carriers, including Nextel Communications and T-Mobile in the Netherlands, have deployed Flash-OFDM in limited trials, Flarion just announced its first large-scale infrastructure rollout with Digita, scheduled to begin next year.

“With this acquisition, Qualcomm will be in a stronger position to support advanced deployment in both CDMA and OFDMA [OFDM Access] technologies,” Qualcomm chairman and CEO Paul Jacobs said today in a statement. “We believe that CDMA will provide the most advanced, spectrally efficient wide area wireless networks for the foreseeable future, but with Flarion we can now more efficiently support operators who prefer an OFDMA or hybrid OFDM/CDMA track for differentiating their services.”

The mystique of OFDM lies in its ability to weed out the multipath distortion and signal noise inherent in RF networks--a problem that multiplies as networks become faster. OFDM basically splits a single fast signal into multiple slow signals and uses a series of complex “orthogonal” algorithms to space those signals from another in ways that maximize performance while keeping signal-to-noise ratios to a minimum. OFDM is already used in many cable TV transmission and 802.11 WLAN technologies, and is the basis for the next generation of Mobile WiMAX.

While rooted in the broadband space, OFDM has its proponents in the mobile realm. Vendors like Motorola, Siemens and Nortel Networks have been developing technology along with multiple output/multiple input (MIMO) smart antenna technology as a possible next-generation cellular wireless technology. OFDM is already under consideration by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project for future use in UMTS networks, and vendors have begun submitting similar proposals to its CDMA counterpart, the 3GPP2.

This won’t be Qualcomm’s first venture into OFDM. Its MediaFlo wireless multicast technology is built around the modulation scheme, and it has submitted proposals to the 3GPP2 for a revision of EV-DO that uses OFDM on the forward link. Qualcomm senior vice president of marketing Jeff Belk said Qualcomm doesn’t envision OFDM from placing CDMA by any means, but does see enormous potential for the technology as an alternate technology to CDMA2000 and wideband CDMA, or a technology that could be used in hybrid networks. “It’s a heterogeneous world,” Belk said. “We plan to support multiple technologies.”

Belk added that Qualcomm will support Flarion’s existing trial and commercial deployments and honor all of its current contracts, but he made clear that Qualcomm would not seek to be a Flash-OFDM infrastructure provider in the future. The vendor, however, is committed to developing Flarion’s core OFDM technology into its chipset lines and intellectual property portfolio, Belk said.

“I think history shows that we don’t make acquisitions in a trivial fashion,” he said. “When we choose a technology, we get behind it.”