April 12th, 2006

By: Michael Wolleben

What company is leading the world in WiMAX Mobility? Well if you ask a Lars Johnsson, VP of Business Development for Beceem Communications, the answer is simple - Beceem Communications.

With a combination of strategic investors, laser-like focus and company-wide execution, Beceem Communications has positioned itself to be the leading provider of semiconductor chips, solutions and technology for the fast growing WiMAX mobile broadband market.

If any one should know where 4G is headed, Lars Johnsson would be a good candidate. Johnsson was co-founder of Flarion Technologies, a leading company in Flash-OFDM technology that was acquired last year by Qualcomm. "Flarion's technology was good, but I never felt it was good enough for Prime Time. For a technology to achieve success you need an ecosystem of chip suppliers, radio companies and large system integrators all participating in a global market. That was never the case with Flarion's technology. That is the case with what is happening with WiMAX."
OFDMA, the foundation for mobile WiMAX, has emerged as the leading radio interface in the next generation of two-way mobile wireless systems. OFDMA offers greater spectral efficiency and superior resistance to multipath than the CDMA (code division multiple access) technologies used in 3G wireless systems today. "An OFDMA network provides up to 3 times better performance than a current-generation 3G network, if deployed over an equivalent footprint in similar frequencies and channel widths," say Johnsson.

Last December, Beceem Communications announced the availability of the industry's first baseband and RF chipset, providing support for all features of the Mobile WiMAX Wave 2 Profile. The new chipset included advanced smart antenna technologies such as MIMO and beamforming as well as Beceem's CMOS direct conversion radio.

"The BCS200 solution provides significant performance improvements for WiMAX service providers focused on Wave 2, such as Sprint Nextel," says Johnsson. "The improvements over the prior generation chip include greater than 25 Mbps total throughput, a 25%+ reduction in active power consumption, and at least a 60% footprint reduction enabling WiMAX integration into space constraint applications such as mobile phones and consumer electronics."

Beceem Communications Inc. was founded in October 2003 with the goal of building a wireless technology company offering semiconductor solutions for the wireless broadband market. Beceem's technology is designed to surpass previously established spectral efficiency thresholds while providing excellent resistance to fading, multi-path and Doppler-shift required for use in wireless broadband applications.

Beceem has since been busy building its global business, opening offices in Santa Clara, Irvine and Bangalore India. Beceem has been active in the WiMAX Forum with various leadership positions. "We have been busy building the company starting from day one," says Johnsson. "We have done WiMAX and WiBRO demonstrations with several large companies, most recently Samsung."

"Over the last few years we have been winning customers and building partnerships with many of the leading WiMAX Companies," says Johnsson. "Our customers include a wide variety of different companies and suppliers of WiMAX radios, systems and solutions. They range from large system integrators like Samsung, Motorola and Alcatel to more OEM shops that are focused on the client end devices like ZTE and Sanyo; we are working with all of them."

In addition to growing its customer base, Beceem has also built an impressive list of investors who are providing cash, contacts and business to help grow the young company into a semiconductor leader. This list includes Intel Capital, NEC, Samsung, NTT Docomo, Sequoia Capital and others. Beceem has been using the cash investments to steadily build its global engineering, management and sales teams both in the US and India. With over 220 mostly engineering employees they are starting to see the fruits of their labor with product on schedule product launches and business wins.

If you look at the history and pedigree of Beceem you can see that they had their eye on the ball from day one. Co-Founded by wireless pioneers including Stanford Professor Dr. Arogyaswami Paulraj, Shahin Hedayat, and Babu Mandava, Beceem was always been focused on the larger more lucrative mobile WiMAX market rather than fixed. "We have focused on mobile WiMAX from day one," said Johnsson. "In simple terms you can offer both fixed & mobile WiMAX services with the mobile WiMAX spec. Fixed WiMAX was never intended to offer true mobility. If we focused on fixed WiMAX from the start we would have had to restart on the mobile standard at a later date. Time to market is very important in this business."

Beceem sees a nice market to go after when it comes to mobile WiMAX. "The broadband wireless market will be quite large and WiMAX technology has a definite head start over other 4G technologies like LTE and of course UMB," says Johnsson. "WiMAX networks and trials are being deployed around the world from leading companies like Sprint Nextel. Many of these service providers will overlay their current 3G networks with WiMAX to deliver the high-speed data, video and upstream applications that are difficult with current 3G technologies."