MONTREAL (WiMAX Day). A new report from the market research and industry analyst firm Maravedis predicts that there will be 25 million WiMAX-enabled consumer electronic (CE) devices shipped in 2012.

“Consumers represent the largest audience for mobile Internet products. They want their home broadband experience without restriction of location…. The opportunity is now for consumer electronics manufacturers to create their strategy for connecting an assortment of devices to the Internet for anytime, anywhere and high-speed access,” said Jeff Orr, Maravedis senior analyst and author of the report.

The vision of many electronics companies, including Samsung, is that most electronic devices such as MP3 players, digital cameras and televisions, will have direct connectivity to the Internet via a WiMAX chip. Such connectivity will allow users to automatically upload and download media files without the use of a PC or other device to enable such transfers.

It’s all in the chips
The key to enabling consumer electronics with WiMAX will be the availability of chipsets manufactured for WiMAX radio frequencies. Already, six of the ten largest semiconductor manufacturers are developing integrated circuits (IC) for WiMAX, including: Altair Semiconductor, Beceem Communications, Comsys Mobile, D&H Global Enterprise, Fujitsu, Intel, Motorola, POSDATA, Redpine Signals, Runcom, Samsung, Sequans Communications, STMicroelectronics, TeleCIS Wireless and Wavesat.

Still other companies such as NextWave Wireless are developing innovative baseband SOCs (systems-on-a-chip) and multi-band radio frequency ICs designed to support a plethora of applications, including mobile TV and video-on-demand.

Many manufacturers are already producing chipsets for laptop computers, PCMCIA cards and USB modems, as well as other customer premise equipment (CPE), all of which are set for delivery this year.

However, getting a WiMAX chip inside a small handheld device poses a challenge in the design of ICs that will keep these manufacturers busy with R&D for the next year. The greatest challenge is power consumption. Handheld devices consume a great deal of power from available batteries, similar to current 3G handsets, and the WiMAX chipsets must be able to control total power consumption to as low as 150 mW.

While “the complexity of RF integration cannot be taken lightly,” according to Orr, it seems there is already a great deal of collaboration among industry participants, and it is likely that rapid growth in the development of chipsets for consumer electronics will be ignited by innovative partnerships amongst equipment vendors, software developers and network providers. Microsoft is reported to be involved in tests with ultra-mobile PCs and WiMAX PDAs using Windows XP, and some WiMAX chipsets are seeking Microsoft WHQL approval.

Once production of these CE chipsets get underway, they will add significantly to the total number of chips manufactured for WiMAX, which can reach 160 million over the next five years, according to Orr. As production of all WiMAX chipsets increases, the industry will witness an inevitable decrease in pricing, and Maravedis predicts “the $42 WiMAX chipset costs seen in 2006 will approach $10 by 2012.”