Provider of 4G chips Beceem Communications used the Mobile World Congress to announce the “game-changing” BCS500 chip that integrates 4G LTE/WiMAX technology. The multi-mode chip supports the latest revisions of the IEEE 802.16 standard (16e and 16m), as well as the 3GPP-LTE standard, based on Release 8 specifications. Beceem goes on to add it’s the only device chip to support UE Class 4 capabilities, and also TDD and FDD configurations for LTE and IEEE 802.16m. This in turn enables real-time band/channel reconfiguration through the so called “autosense” feature that automatically detects the network type.
You may not care about the tech mumbo-jumbo above, but you do care to know it supports up to 150Mbps downlink speeds, which is awesome.
On the downside, Beceem said we’ll have to wait for the second quarter of 2011 to see the BCS500 hitting mass production. Sampling, however, starts in Q4 2010.