Tokyo, Japan — Operators of WiMAX networks can look forward to baseband equipment with improvements in range, coverage quality, and operating efficiency. At least that’s what Freescale Semiconductor and ArrayComm LLC are saying after their joint development solution for WiMAX equipment.

The companies’ reference design is intended to accelerate and simplify the creation of high-performance WiMAX basestation equipment. The solution combines ArrayComm’s multi-antenna signal-processing software (A-MAS) with Freescale’s MSC8144 quad-core DSP. The reference design uses the MSC8144 DSP to handle both media-access-control (MAC) and physical-layer (PHY) processing.

Compared with current generations of WiMAX basestation equipment systems, products based on the combined solution are expected to offer two to four times greater coverage, more than doubled data rates, and up to a fourfold increase in capacity for 802.16/WiMAX networks, claim the companies.

The reference design meets the IEEE 802.16e standard and conforms to the WiMAX Forum Wave 2 base profile.