SRG Reports Shows MediaTek WiMAX SoC Surpassed its Peers' Performances

MediaTek (News - Alert) Inc., a fabless semiconductor company for wireless communications and digital multimedia solutions, has announced that in a recent independent performance benchmark test of Mobile WiMAX (News - Alert) chipsets, the company’s WiMAX SoC was almost steadily the better performing solution.

The WiMAX chipset (CPE form factor) from MediaTek surpassed the performance of four of its peers (USB dongle and Minicard form factors) from similar product segment in a broad variety of tests created to test the capabilities of the chipsets under extreme network conditions.

Signals Research Group, LLC (SRG), which offers field research and consulting services covering the wireless telecommunications industry, conducted the benchmark tests. The tests were published in an issue of Signals Ahead, SRG’s research product that’s subscription-based.

The consultancy collaborated with Agilent Technologies (News - Alert) for this round of chipset testing. To test the chipsets in a laboratory-controlled environment, Agilent Technologies provided the Agilent E6651A Mobile WiMAX Test Set and the N5106A PXB baseband generator and channel emulator, together with engineering support.

This was the first independent test of Mobile WiMAX chipsets in the industry. Uplink and downlink performance are included in the test scenarios. The results provided a strong indication of how well the solutions would be able to transmit and receive data in a commercial Mobile WiMAX network.

The report came to a conclusion that MediaTek solution sent out the cleanest signal. This was agreed upon by measuring the EVM (Error Vector Magnitude) with this finding signifying that under certain conditions the MediaTek solution could be able to support higher uplink data rates than its peers.

The test results also showed that there was as much as a 2x performance difference in the downlink between the MediaTek solution and the performance of several of its peers under extreme conditions. Therefore, a superior superior receiver performance can be provided by MediaTek solution. It can also achieve the highest throughput with very low signal levels.