NextWave Wireless Inc. and Huawei Technologies (Huawei) will jointly develop and market advanced WiMAX broadcast solutions for mobile operators worldwide. The collaboration will bring WiMAX solutions to market more rapidly and cost-effectively in order to address the needs of the growing market for mobile TV and broadcast services.
Under the Agreement, Huawei will integrate NextWave's MXtv Macro-Diversity Multicast and Broadcast technology into its fourth-generation base station platform and ASN-GW network platforms, which fully conform to the 802.16e (WiMAX) air interface standard. In addition, NextWave has integrated the technology into its low-power, Wave 2 compliant NW2000 WiMAX subscriber System-on-a-Chip (SoC).
Early reference design development samples of the NW2000 are expected to be available in Q2 2008 with commercial sample availability expected in Q3 2008. The partnership between the two companies drives the development of higher performance and more cost-effective WiMAX-based mobile broadcast solutions.
The two companies have already completed initial design and implementation, and are currently undergoing integration and interoperability testing at NextWave's lab facilities. Huawei's and NextWave's solutions are expected to be commercially available at the end of the second quarter in 2008.
To further drive the acceleration of WiMAX services at the device layer, NextWave's next-generation family of "No-Compromise" WiMAX semiconductors has integrated the required hardware accelerators to support MXtv technology. Expected to become commercially available later in 2008, NextWave's fully integrated Wi-Fi/WiMAX SoC with advanced 65-nanometer CMOS process technology, has incorporated numerous innovations to improve performance and reduce power consumption and is being designed to support bandwidth-intensive mobile multimedia applications such as streaming video, video conferencing, and for Quality-of-Service (QoS) sensitive applications such as Voice-over-IP (VoIP). In addition, NextWave's next-generation RFIC, also planned for 2008, is designed to support seamless operation and roaming across worldwide WiMAX frequencies, with either TDD or FDD operations, and profiles.
