Altair Announces LTE Chip Roadmap - EE Times

Altair Announces LTE Chip Roadmap
EE Times
Peter Clarke

May 5, 2009

The company announced three chips that will become available between mid-2009 and Q2 2010.

The FourGee-3100 is an LTE CAT-3 baseband processor that in addition to LTE supports other 4G/OFDM technology variants, including WiMax and XGP and will be available in Q4 2009. The chip is bundled with a complete LTE protocol stack which includes PHY, MAC, RLC, PDCP, RRC and NAS layers.

The FourGee-6150 is a MIMO RF transceiver that supports LTE-TDD. This product is due to become available in mid-2009, Altair said.

The FourGee-6200 is a multi-band LTE-FDD MIMO transceiver that supports the most popular LTE bands in North America, Japan and Europe. The chip will be available in Q210, the company asserted.

Altair's LTE chipsets are developed using the company's proprietary software-defined 4G processor architecture, known as O2P. This technology is currently deployed in Altair's FourGee-2150 chip for mobile WiMax, and FourGee-4150, for XGP.

"LTE technology has numerous combinations of frequency bands and duplex methods in different markets and regions. Being able to support those various combinations is one of Altair's key differentiators," said Oded Melamed, CEO of Altair Semiconductor, in a statement.

"The flexibility of Altair's chips and our experience with other 4G technologies enable us to bring our LTE products to market more quickly and with less capital investment than other companies in the space," said Eran Eshed, co-founder and vice president of marketing and business development for Altair, in the same statement.