While the world watches Intel Corp. try to position itself at the top of the WiMAX market for laptop chips, French chipmaker Sequans Communications quietly announced that its low-power-consuming WiMAX chip for handsets and WiMAX infrastructure products is being sampled by top manufacturers.
During an interview, Georges Karam, Sequans president and chief executive officer, confirmed that the company’s 802.16e-compliant chip is already in the hands of LG Electronics Co. Ltd. and others, but the company declined to name names beyond LG.
Sequans recently picked up $24 million during a third round of funding, bringing its total venture-capital financing to about $34 million. Kenet Venture Partners led the round, joined by existing investors Add Partners, Cap Decisif, T-Source, SG Asset Management and Vision Capital.
Karam pointed out that Sequans’ chips for fixed WiMAX, launched last year, are performing well, especially where interoperability is concerned, and predicted that the company’s mobile WiMAX chips will also live up to the rigors of interoperability, both in testing and in live applications.
Karam’s confidence comes from having participated in private plugfests as well as successful dealings with established WiMAX vendors like Aperto Networks Inc., Redline Communications Inc., Telsima, AirSpan, Alcatel Inc. and MiTAC Industrial Corp.
But interoperability aside, the chip’s primary attention getter is its low-power-consumption needs, which Sequans estimates to be about one-third of that required by other manufacturers’ chips.
Sequans said its chips will be built into PC cards manufactured by MiTAC, but primarily, the company is aiming to land its chips in handsets.
Karam said he expects to rake in deals of about $3 million this year and pointed out that Sequans brought in $2.4 million in 2005. He expects the company to be cash-positive by the end of 2007.
But he also insisted that he’s not motivated to sell Sequans, saying, “That’s how you kill a company. We want to see this chip in handsets—we want to dominate WiMAX silicon.”
Karam and his core team have been developing technology together for some time, first at Alcatel, then at Pacific Broadband, which was acquired by Juniper Networks, and now at Sequans. Interestingly, the team did a considerable amount of work on DOCSIS, a cable broadband technology that has many parallels to wireless broadband and WiMAX. Sequans spokeswoman Kimberly Tassin said that Karam and his chief scientist, Hikmet Sari, wrote the first paper on OFDMA.
Also of interest, Karam doesn’t seem the least bit worried about Qualcomm Inc.’s plans to collect WiMAX royalties. He brushed off the company’s claims of proprietary OFDMA claims, saying Qualcomm’s Flarion Technologies Inc. subsidiary isn’t the only company that has developed OFDMA technology.
