Sequans said today Alcatel-Lucent has made invested an undisclosed sum into the French chipset maker and agreed to use Sequans’ WiMAX technology in its micro and pico base stations in addition to its former arrangement to supply silicon for customer premise equipment.

Alcatel-Lucent is the second major vendor to hand over cash to Sequans. In November, Motorola joined a funding round for the company though, as in the Alcatel-Lucent deal, the financial details of the investment were not revealed.

Sequans CEO Georges Karam said that while the investments were welcome, the true significance of the deals comes from the partnerships Sequans is forming with both companies. “It’s not a small amount, but what matters is the strategic relationship,” Karman said.

Sequans’ silicon will now have a prominent place in both vendors’ WiMAX portfolios, which could turn into huge business opportunities for the small semiconductor company, Karam said. Motorola already has major deals in place with Sprint, Clearwire and several other international carriers, while Alcatel has been aggressively pursuing both fixed and Mobile WiMAX deployments.

In the case of Alcatel-Lucent, though, Sequans chipset will not make it into the vendor’s core product, the Evolium base station. Of the company’s two halves, Alcatel took the lead in WiMAX R&D, developing a software defined radio (SDR) that uses no ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit), which is essentially what Sequans WiMAX chipsets are. But Karam said that the SDR base station will likely only be deployed at the Macro base station level. Putting SDR technology into microcells and picocells would be far too expensive, and Alcatel needed a flexible ASIC technology to fill out its base station portfolio.

“People will start out with macro base stations because that is the wireless way of doing things,” Karam said, but once the initial blanket of WiMAX coverage is established in any given market, vendors will need to supply in-building and in-fill coverage solutions to fully blanket a city.