Sequans: World's First WiMAX Forum Certified Base Station

Rich Tehrani sent me a WiMAX press release eariler today, so I thought I would share the news. Sesquans announced the "world's first" WiMAX Forum certified base station and subscriber station reference designs. Sequans is the first silicon provider to offer a complete end-to-end certified chipset solution.

Full release is below:

SEQUANS Communications, a fabless semiconductor company and leading supplier of WiMAX silicon and software for broadband wireless access, today announced that the company’s Subscriber Station and Base Station reference designs, based respectively on its SQN1010 and SQN2010 SoC’s, and S-Cube software solution, have achieved certification by the WiMAX Forum.

Sequans’ SQN2010-RD base station reference design was certified by the WiMAX Forum last month and now Sequans’ subscriber station reference design, the SQN1010-RD, has also received the Forum’s seal of approval. Sequans’ products passed stringent and extensive testing, consisting of protocol conformance, radio conformance and interoperability testing, in order to obtain the WiMAX Forum Certification seal.

“We are delighted about SEQUANS Communications’ achievement of certification for their reference designs based on their chipset,” said Ron Resnick, president of the WiMAX Forum. “Sequans was very supportive in the certification and plugfests processes, which is a testament to its industry commitment in developing high-performance standards-based silicon.”

Sequans’ reference designs allow equipment manufacturers to quickly develop a wide range of products from high-end base stations to pico-base stations and from outdoor to feature-rich, indoor, self-install terminals and home gateways. Equipment manufacturers benefit from Sequans’ unique implementation of mandatory and optional IEEE 802.16/ETSI HiperMAN features that together drastically improve cell coverage and throughput and enable low-latency support for real-time voice, video and data applications.

“Being among the first to achieve this certification and reaching that status in record time is a testimony of the know how of our team”, said Georges Karam, CEO and President, Sequans Communications.  “We will participate as well in IEEE 802.16e Mobile WIMAX certification and we are well on our way to repeat this performance.”