Qualcomm buys assets from WiMAX company

Qualcomm has bought the system-on-a-chip engineering assets from WiMAX chipset maker TeleCIS Wireless for an undisclosed sum, bolstering its OFDM portfolio and giving Qualcomm a possible Mobile WiMAX portfolio if it chooses to support the technology.

Responding to questions through e-mail, Alex Katouzian, vice president of product management for Qualcomm CDMA Technologies, said Qualcomm has specifically acquired engineering assets related to system-on-a-chip design for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, which could be applied to chipsets across all of Qualcomm’s technologies. TeleCIS sells ASICs and reference designs for fixed and Mobile WiMAX devices including silicon for new smart antenna technologies like multiple input/multiple output platforms.

“Their knowledge and experience can contribute to multiple R&D efforts such as UMB, LTE and other OFDM based technologies such as WiMAX,” Katouzian said. “We have, in the past, publicly stated that we will offer WiMAX on our roadmap if there is a plausible business case, sufficient demand and volumes. Should there be sufficient reasons, these engineering resources would also be able to work on WiMAX for us.”

While Qualcomm has said it will support WiMAX if there is a market, it hasn’t exactly promoted the technology. In fact, Qualcomm executives often take every opportunity to point out the current generation of WiMAX’s flaws compared to its bread-and-butter CDMA Technologies. Qualcomm officials, though, said they will build a dual-mode 3G-WiMAX chipset if its customers adopt the technology, and the SoC design from TeleCIS gives it a perfect platform to launch such multi-mode technology if it does take the leap.

For now, however, Qualcomm is promoting its current line of CDMA technologies, announcing the release of a CDMA 1X EV-DO Rev. B chip, which will merge individual Rev. A channels into a high-capacity 3G super channel. And while Qualcomm is dismissive of WiMAX, it has still embraced OFDM even though it is not a CDMA technology, announcing at CTIA’s Wireless 2007 it has put an Ultra Mobile Broadband chipset on its product development path.