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4G Weekly Digest November 18th, 2009 - Volume 5, Issue 13

WiMAX Wave2 Chipset Vendor Market In-Depth
By Pascal Deriot, Senior Analyst, WiMAX & LTE Equipment

Despite the global financial crisis, shipments of mobile WiMAX chipsets will reach 4 million by the end of 2009, representing a 155% year-over-year growth. With Intel continuing to be a driving force enabling WiMAX penetration of the laptop market, Yota demonstrating fast profitability, Clearwire finally deploying its ambitious POPs coverage plan, and strong competition amongst WiMAX chipset vendors driving down chipset prices, many dynamic contributions in the second half of 2009 will significantly impact WiMAX take-off in 2010.
However several key factors have negatively impacted the growth rate, including the LTE threat, the immaturity of the WiMAX certification process, the overall network deployment delays, and the lack of compelling devices.

The WiMAX subscriber station chipset ecosystem is acutely fragmented, with more than 14 chipset vendors competing for market share. This puts pressure on vendors with insufficient customer traction, lacking funding or scale, or offering only partial chipset solutions. Several early movers who entered the WiMAX market with fixed or Wave1 mobile solutions are now shipping Wave2 compliant chipsets, mainly composed of a base-band chip and a companion RF transceiver IC. However, most of the available chipsets are not highly optimized because they were compelled to cover a broad range of application segments.

The five key WiMAX chipset vendors have introduced differentiated chipset solutions, enabling them to gain significant leadership in their target market segments. However, few players have the scale to effectively address all segments and no global leader has emerged in 2009.

Similar to WiFi or 3GPP/3GPP2 platforms, WiMAX chipset vendors have leveraged their first or second generations to further reduce chipset cost by migrating to a smaller geometry process node and/or by introducing monolithic dies. At the same time, new packaging approaches such as System-in-Package and optimized Bill Of Material have significantly reduced the footprint of the WiMAX platform, allowing device manufacturers to launch a new generation of products that are more appealing, more integrated, and that combine new standards such as 3G and 4G.

The new research report released by Maravedis in partnership with Reveal Wireless entitled “WiMAX Wave2 Subscriber Station Chipset Vendors – Competitive Analysis” provides a detailed comparison of the key WiMAX chipset vendors, identifies system architectures, estimates chipset and system BOM, cost of available devices such as CPEs, USB dongles or Express Cards, and analyzes vendor product roadmaps and SWOT. The next challenge for most WiMAX chipset vendors will be to find the right balance of R&D investments between a transition to LTE, and a more integrated and cost effective path for their WiMAX solution.

Maravedis and Reveal Wireless believe that WiMAX mass-market adoption requires ubiquitous coverage and IOT mature, sub-US$10 chipsets that are power and performance optimized for each application-specific segment. Three chipset vendors are best positioned to achieve the US$10 price target through base-band and RF monolithic die integration in 65-nm. Further, the WiMAX market is not large enough to support 14 chipset vendors. Consolidations, exits and transitions toward LTE are expected in the next two years

The new report also provides an in-depth analysis of key WiMAX chipset vendors. Here is a summary of some of the key findings:

Sequans has gained performance leadership mostly in the fixed market. Their whole Wave2 subscriber product line supports UL transmit diversity, which can significantly reduce the cost and power dissipation of the PA subsystem, while improving the uplink budget. Their solution also supports UL MIMO (Matrix A) operation. They clearly lead the pack in terms of chipset cost in 2009 thanks to a very aggressive baseband die-size in 90nm. They were the first to announce a 65-nm single-die BB+RF solution in Q1 2009, which should replace their base-band and RF IC SiP gap filler by 2010 and enable them to maintain their cost leadership.

Beceem has first mover advantage in most markets, with the exception of the fixed market where Sequans still dominates. Beceem was first on the market with a Wave2 BB and RF chipset. They have one of the most mature Wave2 Protocol Stacks, which has enabled them to gain sockets with all the leading mobile operators. Their product portfolio is very broad, with specific chipset for each segment, including a single-chip base-band and RF SiP based on a 65-nm baseband die. They were the first to introduce a single-chip WiMAX VoIP Network-Processing-Unit SiP in 2008.

Intel demonstrated their BOM integration leadership by introducing a complete dual-band WiMAX RF subsystem SiP that embeds the RF transceiver, PA, filters, switch, and power management functions. Intel dominates in the embedded compute segment where they have leveraged their WiFi 11n leadership, and the strength of their Centrino brand and ecosystem. Intel was the first to introduce a dual-mode WiMAX/WiFi 11n 1x2 chipset based on a WiMAX/WiFi baseband SiP and a multi-band RF transceiver IC paired with a Front-End-Module.

GCT has been the most aggressive in terms of monolithic silicon integration, using mature 130-nm CMOS process. They were the first to introduce a single-die base-band and RF solution, initially for the Wibro/Wave1 market. Their solution is currently the only Wave2 single-die in production; they have recently added the support of WiFi 11g. GCT won the WiMAX World power shootout and demonstrated low-power leadership in USB dongle and PCIe minicard applications.

Samsung Electronics has not extended its reach outside of its internal captive chipset market. SEC provides chipset solutions only to the Samsung device divisions, which have a strong presence in the portable and mobile segments with products such as data cards/USB dongles, embedded mini-cards for Samsung laptops, MIDs and handsets.

While Runcom is focusing on niche end-to-end markets and is no longer considered as a player in mobile WiMAX, Tier2 players such as Wavesat, Comsys, Altair, and Mediatek could emerge and potentially challenge the leading vendors in some specific applications. Wavesat is bringing its programmable PHY solution to maturity and is gaining traction in Japan with PHS OFDMA evolutions launched by Willcom. Comsys has been targeting multi-mode mobile markets with an integrated Edge/WiMAX baseband SoC, leveraging the maturity of their 2.5G modem and protocol stack. Altair has demonstrated ultra low-power SDIO solutions optimized for the mobile market. Mediatek is gaining traction in the fixed market and has the expertise to emerge as a low-cost leader when the market matures.