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At next week’s GSMA Mobile World Congress 2008 in Barcelona, Spain, Fujitsu Microelectronics Europe is presenting Tokyo-based Fujitsu Ltd’s new BroadOne WX series of base-stations for the IEEE802.16e-2005-compliant mobile WiMAX wireless standard.

The WX series is the first part of Fujitsu’s new BroadOne brand, which covers an integrated series of forthcoming base-stations and other products for long-term evolution (LTE), in which next-generation mobile phone systems will be developed for the rapidly emerging wireless broadband market.

The WX series base-stations consume low levels of power, deliver superior performance and, as the smallest base-stations available, are easy to install, claims Fujitsu.

Fujitsu plans to provide three new base-station models, designed for the 2.5GHz and 2.3GHz frequency bands, providing mobile broadband solutions for all types of environments and needs. The WX300 outdoor macrocell base-station will be the first model in the series on sale, with global delivery in second-quarter 2008. Configured as a single, lightweight unit, it is designed for wide-area transmission over a radius of several kilometers. The second model, a compact outdoor microcell base-station, is designed for transmission over a several-hundred-meter radius to fill in areas with a lower concentration of users and remote areas with poor coverage. The third model is an indoor, ultra-compact picocell base-station.

The WX300’s high-output transmitter uses a gallium nitride high-electron-mobility transistor (HEMT). This device is coupled with Fujitsu’s digital pre-distortion (DPD) technology (which adds an input signal with the opposite characteristics to the distortion generated in an amplifier - correcting distortion in advance - and has a proven track record in 3G systems). This creates two high-output (10W) transceivers (2 x 2 MIMO compliant) packaged in a single unit. Bandwidth is 5, 10, or 20MHz (2 x 5MHz, 2 x 10MHz).

As well as being light (about 20kg) and energy-efficient (with power consumption of 200W or less), the firm claims that the WX300 is the world’s smallest all-in-one outdoor macrocell base-station (with a volume of 20 liters, incorporating the wireless transceiver, wireless signal processor, media converter, GPS receiver, and power supply in a single enclosure). This significantly reduces the cost of installing and operating mobile WiMAX base-stations, enabling service providers to offer end-users service at more viable rates, says the firm.

Fujitsu also recently entered into an alliance with wireless equipment maker Airspan Networks Inc of Boca Raton, FL, USA to share technology and resell each others’ products to offer a complete product line to WiMAX providers.

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