The silicon flowed at WiMAX World this week as several chip-makers unveiled their platforms for future mobile WiMAX gear. GTC, Motorola and Sequans all released silicon targeted at the WiMAX Forum’s Wave 2 certification round, from which the first large-scale wave of commercial WiMAX deployment is expected to emerge led by Clearwire and Sprint.

Wave 2 supports both true mobility (hand-off between base stations) as well as multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) techniques, a smart antenna technology that uses multiple transmission paths to boost capacity and maintain a wireless link in highly congested, highly mobile environments. Sprint has led the effort to move WiMAX to full mobility from the get-go and consequently chipset-makers and device manufacturers have been scrambling to meet Sprint’s 2008 launch deadline.

“This is the natural progression of the industry,” said Peter Jarich, wireless research director for Current Analysis. “We’re starting with the chipsets, then we’ll move onto equipment and then to devices.” The only difference between WiMAX and other wireless technologies is the pressure a single carrier is placing on vendors to release commercial devices as quickly as possible.

“Sprint is forcing such an immediate focus on consumer devices,” Jarich said. “There’s so much more pressure on the chipset guys to make cheap, low-power and working silicon right at launch. Not only that, but they have to be interoperable.”

Motorola today revealed its long-awaited WiMAX chipsets for handheld devices, which it said it would incorporate into the upcoming lines of smartphone, palmtop and tablet devices it and its partners produce. While Moto offered few technical specifics about the platform, it promised to produce a 3G and 4G dual-mode chipset, which would allow for roaming between cellular and WiMAX data networks. It did not say whether the silicon would support both CDMA and GSM flavors of 3G, but it has promised to develop dual-mode EV-DO/WiMAX devices for Sprint.

Motorola also unveiled its first customer premises equipment (CPE) unit, though its new WiMAX silicon is not embedded. The new standalone desktop gateway instead incorporates the Intel WiMAX Connection 2250 chipset, also known as Rosedale 2, supporting both fixed and mobile WiMAX configurations. Unlike the new batch of chipsets being unveiled at the show, the 2250 isn’t a fully compliant Wave 2 device, optimized for broadband connectivity rather than true mobility. Intel has said its first MIMO-powered Wave 2 chips, code-named “Echo Peak,” will be available in 2007 as PC wireless cards and embedded in laptops as a dual-mode Wi-Fi/WiMAX Centrino chipset in 2008.

Sequans unveiled its Wave 2 chip last May, and last week it signaled its intention to get into the base station side of the business with its SQN2130 chip, optimized for picocell and femtocell architectures. This week, Sequans announced a raft of customers for the new chip design: Alvarion is using the chip for its new picocell architecture to compliment its larger macro base station portfolio; Soma Networks said it will use the chipset in its FlexMAX macro base station; and Telsima announced it would use the SQN2130 to upgrade its currently deployed fixed WiMAX base stations — which not coincidentally use Sequans fixed WiMAX chip — to mobile WiMAX. A smaller vendor, Telsima has quietly racked up fixed WiMAX wins in India and other developing markets. It has 10,000 base stations deployed and has shipped more than 100,000 CPEs, making a potentially huge win for the new Sequans platform.

Most of the smaller WiMAX silicon companies are focusing on device silicon as the larger vendors develop their own base station chips, which is generally a much lower volume business. But Georges Karam, CEO of Sequans, said that WiMAX networks are angling toward femtocell and picocell architectures, which make base station ASICs and reference design licensing a much more attractive business.

“With macro base stations, the volumes aren’t there,” Karam said. “We’re much more interested in pico base stations, where you can scale to thousands of base stations in a single market and eventually to femtocells, where there could be 100,000 base stations in any given market.”

That WiMAX femtocell business may be coming sooner rather than later. To round off its plethora of deals, Sequans announced that it and PMC-Sierra have developed a complete femtocell architecture, using the Sequans 2130 baseband chip and PMC’s new radio frequency (RF) integrated circuit, announced last week. Last week, PicoChip revealed Samsung made a strategic investment in the WiMAX and 3G femtocell chip-maker.

Newcomer GTC announced its entry into the increasingly crowded WiMAX silicon market today, taking the tarp off a system-on-a-chip (SoC) integrating RF, media access layer and physical layer components. GTC has been developing wireless broadband chips in Korea for the launch of WiMAX’s predecessor and today marked its entry into the Wave 2 market surrounding Sprint’s U.S. launch. GTC said it has begun sampling the 2.5 GHz chip to an unnamed beta customer and plans to begin commercial production in early 2008. GTC is joined by fellow new entrant ApaceWave, which earlier this month emerged with its own device baseband platform targeted at low-cost CPEs and PC cards.

In addition to the SoCs, two RF module makers introduced their silicon at WiMAX World: Freescale launched RF amplifiers for 2.5 GHz and 3.5 GHz, PMC-Sierra unveiled its RF integrated circuit, and Analog Devices introduced an analog-to-digital baseband transceiver.

And finally, IBM and Wavesat said today that they are working together to develop a low-power WiMAX chipset targeted at consumer devices. IBM has agreed to manufacture Wavesat’s UMobile chip, adding the business computing giant’s own eDRAM memory to the finished silicon. The idea, the companies said, is to produce an out-of-the-box silicon platform so device makers won’t have to add any additional storage, saving valuable real estate.

Other WiMAX World News:

•    MobileAccess released a WiMAX MIMO module for its in-building coverage platform. The in-building architecture distributes radio coverage throughout a building, backhauling a cellular signal to a remotely located base station. MobileAccess said the module can be used to add WiMAX access to its platform already installed in thousands of buildings globally.
•    Alcatel-Lucent and Kyocera signed a joint development agreement to cooperate on WiMAX, pairing Alcatel’s beamforming base station architecture with Kyocera devices.
•    Aperto said its 5.8 GHz PacketMAX base station is now commercially available. The base station is its first fixed WiMAX product to gain certification.