SAN DIEGO (WiMAX Day). One of the most innovative companies developing technologies for WiMAX is NextWave Wireless. The company’s subsidiary NextWave Broadband today announced its plans to develop and supply a range of WiMAX baseband and multi-band RFIC chipsets.

In a press release, the company said that its chipsets “are intended to provide wireless device and network equipment manufacturers with an advanced platform to develop next-generation WiMAX mobile terminal and infrastructure products.” NextWave will deliver samples of these chipsets this quarter, and high-volume production is planned for next year.

A great deal of the success of WiMAX rests in the design and supply of chipsets that will enable devices to connect to WiMAX networks. NextWave said its chipsets will incorporate numerous innovations by the company that are designed to “improve performance, reduce power consumption, enable new types of advanced multimedia applications, and allow seamless operation and roaming across worldwide WiMAX frequencies and profiles.”

NextWave is banking on the success of its technology, and in the chipset segment of the market, it has considerable competition. However it would seem that NextWave will carve a niche for itself in the market providing advanced reference designs, especially with their focus on convergence, inter-operability with WiFi, and, according to Mark Kelley, Chief Division Officer of the company’s Advanced Technology Group, its vision of the media-centric future of WiMAX.

“We believe our chipsets will establish a new standard for price-performance and raise the performance bar for next-generation, wireless broadband enabled mobile devices and consumer electronics products,” Kelly said.

NextWave’s first generation of chipsets will be the NW1000 platform. Offered as mobile subscriber system-on-a-chip (SOC) and multi-band RFIC, they will be IEEE 802.16e standards compliant and optimised for mobile broadband. The chipsets will offer support for the major global WiMAX spectrum allocations, including 2.3 GHz, 2.5 GHz, and 3.4 ~ 3.8 GHz, and their local variations such as the WCS and EBS/BRS bands in America.

The second generation of chipsets, due for release in 2008, will be the NW2000 platform. It is “designed to provide customers with an ultra-low-power, integrated WiMAX/Wi-Fi solution to support power-limited mobile devices in a wide range of frequency bands.”

The complete NW2000 family of RFICs and baseband SOCs will provide a dizzying array of features, as well as multiple reference designs to “minimize development risk and time-to-market for multiple device types including handsets, smartphones, PDAs, PC modem cards, fixed CPE modems, USB dongles and Personal Media Players (PMPs).”

NextWave says it has designed its platform of chipsets to meet the real world demands of the growing WiMAX industry. Its solutions, semiconductor products and reference designs “will enable network infrastructure and subscriber terminal manufacturers to quickly and cost-effectively develop highly differentiated products to meet the rapidly increasing demands of the market.”