picoChip surfing Wimax, Femtocell wave

picoChip, the Bath-based wireless start-up, is seeing a booming market for Wimax chips and an emerging femtocell chip market which should match Wimax for size next year.

"picoChip is the largest supplier of silicon to the Wimax infrastructure industry and the only supplier of silicon to the femtocell market", picoChip founder and COO, Peter Claydon, told Silicon South-West's recent Wireless 2.0 conference in Bristol.

"The Sprint/Xohm/Clearwire Wimax service in the US starts commercial launch in September which means we are selling more chips every month. It's quite a large amount", said Claydon, "and we sell a lot in Japan. We've been amazingly successful in the Japanese market. picoChip has 100 per cent market share in Japan because it sells to Samsung and Fujitsu. We have a good distributor there."

With Intel, Samsung, Motorola and Nokia putting Wimax chips into portable products like phones and laptops, and with the Japanese having recently completed a 2.5GHz spectrum auction for a next generation PHS system based on Wimax, the Wimax chip market is set to grow exponentially.

Asked if he's worried about Intel and Fujitsu getting into the Wimax chip business, Claydon replied: "Intel are going to put Wimax chips into laptops. We are focused exclusively on the wireless infrastructure side. Intel don't see the value in the infrastructure side, the value in laptops is a lot higher. Fujitsu sells to the terminal side not the base-station side."