Metawave(R) Communications Corp. and Samsung today announced that they have entered into an agreement to jointly develop a commercial base station that will incorporate Metawave's patented embedded smart antenna technology.

The agreement marks the first development and subsequent commercial rollout of embedded smart antenna systems that are expected to increase the capacity and improve the performance of current and future CDMA networks, including 2.5G and 3G.

Under the terms of the royalty-bearing license agreement, Metawave will design capacity-enhancing technologies uniquely tailored to Samsung's base station architecture. The new embedded smart antenna product will be based on Samsung's next generation CDMA system and is expected to provide significant capacity advantages over traditional base station designs. Following introduction of the new CDMA embedded product for cdmaOne(R) and cdma2000(R), Samsung plans to expand Metawave's smart antenna technology to its base station products for other major air interface standards, such as W-CDMA.

"As we develop our new base station product for future networks, Metawave's smart antenna technology will be a key component in easing the migration to 3G and enhancing the value of our base stations by adding capacity," said Mr. Kwang Kook Kim, manager of technology planning at Samsung. "Metawave has a solid track record with its current capacity-enhancing smart antenna solutions for existing networks and has made significant advancements in adaptive array technologies for future networks."

Metawave's embedded smart antenna technology is designed for cdmaOne, cdma2000 (1X-RTT, 1X-EV and 3X-RTT) and W-CDMA. Metawave has developed patented spatial and adaptive processing algorithms and ASIC designs for embedded smart antenna systems that can increase the capacity of CDMA and other air interfaces by more than two times the capacity of current base stations.

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