High-speed wireless LAN chip startup Airgo Networks Inc. this week won its first contract to supply chips to Samsung Corp. for business-class wireless notebooks.

Samsung will use Airgo's MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) chips in its X20 and X25 notebooks, although they won't make it Stateside because Samsung has non-compete arrangement with Dell Inc. (Nasdaq: DELL) in the U.S.

Still, Dave Borison, director of product management at Airgo, is holding out hope that the Samsung deal will perk Dell's interest. "They occasionaly OEM products from Samsung," he notes.

Dell deal or not, the firm appears to be keeping interest in MIMO going, even as the 802.11n standard that will use the technology is stalled in committee. Borison says that Airgo has now shifted four million chips, thanks to deals with consumer operations like Linksys (see Airgo Hits Million Mark).

MIMO, you'll no doubt remember, is a technology uses multiple antennas on the client device and backend to increase the speed and capacity of a wireless network (see Airgoooooooooooo! ). The Samsung notebooks will support existing 802.11 standards.

— Dan Jones, Site Editor, Unstrung