Taipei, Dec. 3, 2007 (CENS)--According to Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Nikkei), Fujitsu and Taiwan government-backed think tank Institute for Information Industry (III) will jointly set up a WiMAX chip research and development facility in Taiwan for billions of Japanese yuan.

People familiar with the deal pointed out Minster Without Portfolio F.C. Lin and III executives today will attend a signing ceremony in Japan marking the cooperation between III and Fujitsu.

The deal is the first of its kind between Taiwan and Japan, according to Nikkei. The newspaper said III and Fujitsu will likely announce the deal next week at the earliest, and the chips developed in the Taiwan facility will be shipped to a Fujitsu factory in Japan for volume production.

The chips will eventually go into mobile phones and other handheld equipment supplied by Taiwanese manufacturers to deal with streaming pictures on the Internet.

Fujitsu has confirmed the report and its spokesperson said that the company had hashed out all possibilities about the WiMAX cooperation including setting up a joint venture.

The chip is said to enable personal computers, mobile phones, and other digital devices to wireless send and receive data at throughput of 70 million bytes per second, a rate fast enough for dealing with high-quality picture transmission on the Internet on the move.

Economics Minister Steve Chen said he welcomes the deal and said his ministry had listed WiMAX communication as a pivotal industry for priority development in Taiwan.

Industry watchers pointed out Taiwan is an advantageous place for WiMAX-gear development since it is a major manufacturing base for many contract information-technology products including computer motherboards. It now fills around 90% of global need for the boards.

(by Ken Liu)