Wavesat Announces Product Strategy for 802.16e Mobile WiMAX

February 12, 2007

Wavesat's leadership in the WiMAX space is further strengthened with the announcement of its IEEE 802.16e Mobile WiMAX strategy, centered around its UMobile family of WiMAX chipsets supporting all features of Mobile WiMAX Wave 2 profiles in a cost effective, flexible and highly programmable architecture.

The first chipset in the UMobile family, codenamed Panther, features a highly cost efficient and ultra low power consuming SOC, supporting the IEEE 802.16e-2005 standards for WiMAX mobile networks. Wavesat Panther chipset implements all MAC and PHY features required for Wave 2 WiMAX certification in a single chip, and includes advanced MIMO and beam forming technologies.

Panther's unique advantages include:
- Very high performance and fully programmable PHY & MAC solution, including smart antenna features such as MIMO 2x2.
- Lowest cost solution and footprint in the industry with on-chip DRAM in a 9x9mm package (no external memory required), allowing very easy integration into small form-factor applications such as wireless dongles, consumer appliances and mobile handsets.
- Very low power consumption at 150 mW in receive mode by using ultra low power DSP technology and enhanced power saving modes
- Highly programmable architecture supporting multimode operation including ODFMA / OFDM / and legacy 802.11a & g.

"Wavesat maintains its leadership in WiMAX chipsets and solutions with the announcement of its UMobile product strategy for 802.16e WiMAX," said Michel Guay, President and CEO, Wavesat. "Our deep understanding of the WiMAX marketing and customer's needs has translated into a unique and cost-effective architecture, offering a mix of flexibility and performance allowing our customers to very easily integrate our UMobile chipsets into their WiMAX solutions".

Adlane Fellah, CEO and Founder of Maravedis commented "We predict that there will be an accumulated 87 million broadband Wireless Access subscribers (excluding cellular) by the end of 2012, 67 million of which will be WiMAX subscribers. WiMAX will represent 90% of subscribers who are added in 2012, of whom 75% will be using 802.16-2005 technology. WiMAX chipsets will start to be embedded into laptops in the beginning of 2008, into handheld devices in the beginning of 2009, and into consumer electronics in the beginning of 2010. In this context, Wavesat who has been a pioneer in the development of WIMAX SOCs is well positioned to tap into this future competitive WIMAX mobile market."

Wavesat is conducting detailed IOT testing with prototype Panther units, and commercial samples will be available in Q4/07. Wavesat will be exhibiting at 3GSM, February 12-15, 2007 in Barcelona booth 2.1 C58.