Intel's WiMAX Basestation Designs Include Fixed, Mobile BoardsIntel's WiMAX Basestation Designs Include Fixed, Mobile Boards

BATH, England — Intel Corp. demonstrated a WiMAX basestation platform at the International Basestation Conference here this week and revealed it is developing a board for both the fixed and mobile versions of the high-speed access technology.

The chip group, which has been at the forefront of promoting WiMAX — and is believed to have spent about $500 million on developing the techology over the past few years — showed the development platform for the first time at the conference.

The board includes an Intel network processor, the IXP 2350 and has space for two baseband processors that implement the 802.16-2004 OFDM PHY for fixed WiMAX and, when available, the mobile version of the technology, 801.26e. The WiMAX software that ties it all togeher was developed by Intel. The codename is "Carrington," EE Times has learned.

For now, the processors are being supplied by "multiple vendors and development partners" such as PicoChip or Analog Devices Inc., Intel said.

The Advanced Mezzanine Card format board also has flash memory, FPGAs, an optical interface and an interface for Gigabit Ethernet.

According to Andrew Greenhaigh, strategic marketing director at Intel's mobility group, several major infrastructure OEMs are interested in the platform and the board under development.

"We are working hard to stimulate the entire WiMAX market and the opportunity, and have certainly gained traction recently with the launch a few weeks ago of the Rosedale chip set for customer premises equipment. The next obvious stage is to develop the building blocks for basestations," Greenhaigh said.

Though early designs will use processors such as PicoChip's 102 with the physical interface for WiMAX, "in the longer term we could integrate that PHY IP into our own processors," Greenaigh said. The board under development is being provisioned for the 801.16e mobile version of WiMAX, which is not expected to be in commercial deployment until late 2007. Early versions will feature only the processor for the fixed version of WiMAX. For mobile use, two processors will be needed to enable adaption between the two flavors of WiMAX.