Intel's WiMax chip starts shipping in volume

IDG News Service - WiMax broadband wireless technology cleared a hurdle today when Intel Corp. announced volume shipments of its Rosedale chip for the wireless broadband technology.
Intel has put its marketing weight behind WiMax for years as standards development dragged on, but the chip giant finally is supporting the technology by churning out silicon. Equipment vendors including Alvarion Ltd., Proxim Corp., Redline Communications Inc. and ZiMax Technologies Inc. all have announced agreements to use Intel silicon in products based on the IEEE 802.16-2004 standard that Rosedale addresses.
In addition, some equipment vendors announced products using the chip, formally called the Intel Pro/Wireless 5116. Among them was Markham, Ontario-based Redline, which is launching its RedMax line of customer premises equipment. The company planned to introduce a product with an outdoor antenna and an indoor box with connections for phone and broadband data service, said Kevin Suitor, vice president of business development. It will cost consumers less than $500.
Redline currently is running 50 trials with service providers using its pre-WiMax product, called the AN-100, he said.
Intel is not the first chip maker to announce WiMax silicon, but it carries a lot of weight as both a high-volume chip leader and the rich uncle of the WiMax family, ready to put marketing dollars behind the technology. Rosedale hitting the market marks a significant moment for the technology, according to Michael Cai, an analyst at Parks Associates, in Dallas.
"The industry is really looking at Intel, because it's been positioned as the leader in the WiMax space," Cai said.
The next major step for WiMax will be product certification and interoperability testing by the WiMax Forum, the industry body moving to commercialize 802.16 technology. Industry observers expect 802.16-2004 products, which are designed to deliver broadband services to homes and offices without wires, to be tested by the forum in this year's third quarter and hit the market some time before year's end.
Rosedale is a "system on a chip" for customer premises devices that would send and receive data from a base station that could be several miles away. The chip includes a Media Access Control (MAC) component for the IEEE 802.16-2004 standard, a "phy" (physical interface) element that uses OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing), an integrated 10/100M bit/sec. Ethernet MAC for a home or office LAN, and a TDM controller interface to support voice and streaming data, according to Intel.
Intel integrated all those components on the chip as part of its focus on low-cost equipment that it believes will make wireless broadband a