picoChip of Bath, the WiMAX and femtocell chip specialist, is shipping increasingly significant numbers of WiMAX ICs, but expects those shipments soon to be swamped by femtocell chip shipments.

Industry rumours suggest that one of picoChip's customers, IPAcess, has won a massive order from AT&T for 7 million femtocells.

Panmure Gordon, the stockbrokers and investment bankers, have put out a note saying that IPAccess won the order despite competition from Motorola, Alcatel, Nokia-Siemens, Airvana and 2Wire, among others.

If the rumour is true, then femtocell shipments are going to explode. "This is the year it's got to get real," said Rupert Baines, v-p of marketing at picoChip, who coined the term 'femtocell', "at least twenty carriers are doing significant things with femtocells, and some have said they'll place an order."

For picoChip, this means that this is the last year that WiMAX chips will be its biggest earner. "The major part of the picoChip business at the moment is WiMAX," said Baines, "the biggest order we've had for femtocell chips is 10,000, that's prototype quantities still, whereas we've sold 100,000 WiMAX chips to one customer in the last 18 months. But seven out of the top ten telecoms OEMs are developing femtocells, and our femtocell chip shipments will overtake our WiMAX shipments next year."

Despite rumours of difficulties at Xohm, the Sprint-Nextel WiMAX network being built in the US, picoChip is getting significant, regular, orders for WiMAX chips from Xohm to go into the base stations for its new network.

In addition to Xohm, picoChip has about a dozen customers taking reasonable amounts of WiMAX chips, with another 50 or so customers which are doing WiMAX development work.

"WiMAX is good for greenfield operators saying: 'I need a network'" said Baines, "and WiMAX is going to be built into notebooks because Intel has said that's what they're going to do."

See also: Electronics Weekly's Focus on WiMAX, a roundup of content related to the next-gen wireless comms technology

See also: Mannerisms, the blog of David Manners. Updated twice daily, it's the distinctive, entertaining, authoritative and never dull commentary on the semiconductor industry, from someone who knows. Sign up for the Mannerisms eNewsletter.