Taiwan's struggle to leadership in the WIMAX sector seems to be further signified by the Japanese business daily Nihon Keizai Shimbun and commented in local business media, according to which Fujitsu and the 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 Yen.

The deal is the first of its kind between Taiwan and Japan, according to Nikkei.

The chips developed in Taiwan 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 to report and its spokesperson said that the company had hashed out all possibilities abut the WIMAX cooperation including setting up a joint venture.

The chip issaid 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 mobile internet devices.

Taiwan's 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 analysts say that Taiwan is an advantageous place for WIMAX gear development since it is a major manufacturing base for many contract information technology products.