ATH (Press Release). picoChip announced today that it is participating more than any other company in the WiMAX Forum Plugfest this week. Of the 19 industry-leading companies who are working together to advance interoperability, picoChip reference designs are represented five times. The company is involved directly, with partner Wintegra, while Airspan, M/A-Com and CETECOM are all participating with products based on picoChip’s PHY.

picoChip’s proven WiMAX PHY is accepted as a de facto industry standard. Notably, it has been selected by CETECOM –the WiMAX Forum’s approved testing authority for the certification of WiMAX products – for use in its protocol conformance tester.

“Certification and interoperability are absolutely critical to the success of communications technology. Indeed, this is the whole point of standards. The success of the WiMAX eco-system, and the speed with which the industry is moving towards interoperability is truly outstanding,” said Guillaume d’Eyssautier, CEO and President at picoChip. “picoChip is wholly committed to the goals of interoperability and we will take our product through to WiMAX certification as soon as possible. It is a testimony to the maturity of our reference designs that so many customers and partners are already using them in the Plugfest.”
WiMAX Forum Plugfests are designed to identify interoperability problems and different interpretations of standards, foster open technical discussions, and help refine interoperability testing for future certification testing.

picoChip provides software-defined radio solutions to address the key challenges of cost, development time and flexibility for the next generation of wireless systems. The company’s multi-core processors deliver a world-beating price/performance combination. Uniquely, the company also delivers complete, standards-compliant reference designs for UMTS (HSDPA, upgradeable to HSUPA) and WiMAX/WiBro (both 802.16d and 802.16e, with support for AAS and MIMO). 802.16-based systems using picoChip are available from Airspan, Intel, Ericsson, M/A-Com, Marconi, Nortel and a number of other manufacturers. The company also has strategic relationships with ETRI and Korea Telecom in Korea and both ICT and BUPT in China. picoChip technology is also being used to develop other 4G wireless protocols such as UMTS-LTE, 802.20 and TD-SCDMA.