Stretch, the software-configurable processor company, is forecasting a big future business in WiMAX.
“There’s a lot of design activity in WiMAX right now in the US, UK, Japan, Korea, Sweden, Finland, and Israel,” the CEO of Stretch, Craig Lytle, told EW.
“WiMAX is taking a strong hold in China, Seoul is 35 per cent covered by WiMAX networks and Sprint in North America is making a big bet on WiMAX. It’s very clear that WiMAX is getting deployed very widely and successfully,” said Lytle.
Interestingly Sprint’s big North American rival Verizon is doing WiMAX at all but is spending $23bn on putting in fibre to the home in North America.
Lytle reckons it will be 2008/9 before Stretch’s WiMAX design wins go into ‘decent’ volumes.
The reason why Stretch is getting the design wins is because of its programmable technology which is important for a technology in its early days, and because it is scalable in the sense that it can be used as a one-off processor in a micro basestation, or with many other processors in commercial network basestations.
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