Beceem Communications announced the immediate availability of what it reports is the industry's first baseband and RF chipset that supports all the features of the Mobile WiMAX Wave 2 Profile. The BCS200 chipset includes advanced smart antenna technologies, such as MIMO and beamforming, plus Beceem's CMOS direct conversion radio.

The BCS200 is designed to meet the launch requirements of WiMAX service providers focused on Wave 2, such as Sprint Nextel. Key performance benchmarks (as compared to the company's Wave 1 WiMAX products) include:

• Greater than 25 Mbps total throughput
• More than 25% reduction in active power consumption
• Greater than 60% footprint reduction enabling WiMAX integration into space constrained applications such as mobile phones and consumer electronics

The BCS200 chipset includes the BCSB200 baseband chip and associated firmware that implements physical layer (PHY) and media access control (MAC) functionality with minimum processing load for the host processor. It also includes the BCSR200 direct conversion CMOS radio supporting 2-GHz and 3-GHz designs, as well as dynamically programmable channel bandwidths from 5 to 10 MHz to support seamless roaming among WiMAX networks. A reference design kit, including driver software and RF calibration tools, is available to facilitate development of Mobile WiMAX devices by OEMs and ODMs.

BCS200 chipset samples and reference design kits are immediately available. For more information, visit www.beceem.com.