HANOVER, Germany -- picoChip today announced the launch of the first commercially available WiMAX basestations using its picoArray™ technology. picoArray will be deployed in basestations in Airspan Networks’ AS.MAX family of WiMAX products that was introduced to the market this week by Airspan at CeBIT in Germany.

As previously announced last October by the companies, Airspan is using picoChip in its HiperMAX and MacroMAX point-to-multipoint basestations. The picoChip technology will allow operators using these basestations to upgrade them, using software only, from the fixed to the mobile WiMAX standard, thereby enabling the basestations to connect to laptops, PDAs and other mobile devices that will be supported by the emerging 802.16e mobile WiMAX standard. The basestations will be commercially available in the third quarter of 2005.

Paul Senior, Vice President, Marketing and Product Management at Airspan, said: "We have built on our 12 years of wireless voice and broadband experience to deliver class-leading WiMAX equipment, and we expect these products to be WiMAX Certified™ as soon as the WiMAX Forum opens its labs in July 2005. A key part of Airspan’s value proposition in making ‘personal broadband’ a reality is the software upgrade path for nomadic and mobile support. We can offer this proposition to our customers only with the power and flexibility of picoChip technology in our infrastructure equipment."

Peter Claydon, CEO and co-founder at picoChip added: "We have been working with Airspan for some time and are delighted that ‘real world’ deployments of WiMAX products are now a reality. We believe that WiMAX will be the catalyst for higher growth of the broadband wireless business and we expect to be the major player in giving WiMAX infrastructure the potential to migrate seamlessly to new standards as the devices and networks evolve. Our technology enables unprecedented flexibility for operators to implement upgrades and adapt to fast-evolving changing standards, such as the expected development of 802.16e in addition to the 802.16-2004 standard."

PicoChip Designs Ltd.