Wavesat Beats Big Boys to WiMAX

December 18, 2004

Wavesat, a small to mid-sized Montreal-based fabless semiconductor company, made good on its promise to be first to market with their WiMAX compliant physical-layer chip, the DM256, beating out other WiMAX Forum members Intel and Fujitsu. Wavesat teamed up with Atmel of San Jose, Calif., an experienced manufacturer of advanced wireless semiconductors and WiMAX Forum member, to produce the chips for this key emerging market.

Wavesat vice president of sales and marketing, Frank Draper, earlier this year stated, "Our aim is to be in the marketplace, to create a market that everybody's only talking about now, to have something real." Investors must agree. In early October, Wavesat announced the successful completion of an $8 million financing round. “This is a strong testimony to the vision and determination of our engineers to design, produce and validate the Industry’s first WiMAX chip,” said Wavesat’s president and CEO Michel Guay.

Whether this amounts to a capture of market share in the emerging WiMAX market remains to be seen, as moving forward, larger competitors will have greater production and distribution advantages. Nonetheless, Wavesat nimbly accomplished the goal it set out to attain.

Related: Company Claims First True WiMax Chip.
Wavesat Shipping First WiMAX Chip.