Samsung Developing LTE and WiMax Chipsets

According to EETimes, Samsung has begun to demonstrate and send engineering samples of its own WiMax baseband chipsets within its own mobile division and to interested third-parties, with LTE chipsets coming down the line.

The reasoning for this is rooted in Qualcomm, as the platform developer has been collecting handsomely on CDMA royalties from the licensing of its CDMA technology in South Korea, with the triumvirate of manufacturers in LG, Samsung, and Pantech seeing the royalties as a stumbling block to further reductions in handset costs.

Now with the growing position of both LTE and the more mature WiMax, Samsung looks to completely eliminate Qualcomm from the equation after first beginning the path to non-Qualcomm chipsets by using CDMA chipsets from Broadcom and Infineon with a software stack developed via an R&D parntership with InterDigital and the aforementioned Infineon that is reportedly free of Qualcomm patents.

Samsung also plans to develop its own lineup of mobile GPUs in a bid to avoid the increasingly expensive licensing fees associated with using either ATI or other third-party mobile GPU technologies.

The company plans to begin production at a newly opened Texas plant with no details on a release timeframe. Samsung also plans to be one of the first handset manufacturers to support LTE, but it has not clarified whether it will use its own chipset in the first handsets scheduled to be available at the end of 2009.