Product Showcase: Altair Semiconductor's ALT2150 - Last Mile

Product Showcase: Altair Semiconductor's ALT2150
Last Mile

Sept. 1, 2008

Altair Semiconductor’s ALT2150 mobile WiMAX baseband processor is the world’s smallest and most power-efficient mobile WiMAX processor. The chip, which was released in March 2008, has been developed for mobile WiMAX-enabled handheld devices, including mobile phones, PDAs, cameras and music players. The ALT2150 is the first in a family of chipsets from Altair crafted to achieve excellent modem performance, while consuming a fraction of the power of any mobile WiMAX chipset available today.

Altair’s product strategy is unique in the WiMAX chip landscape, with an exclusive focus on battery-operated, handheld devices that impose very strict power consumption and size requirements on semiconductor content. It implements full WiMAX Forum Wave-2 physical (PHY) Layer and Media Access Control (MAC) functionality, and offers substantial performance enhancements beyond this profile to ensure compliance and customer satisfaction. In addition, the platform of the ALT2150 is extremely flexible, so it can be easily re-configured to address different 4G markets and technologies without changes to hardware. Altair has demonstrated that an ALT2150-based handheld device consumes less power than an equivalent High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) or Evolution Data Optimized (EVDO) solution.  The chipset’s unique architecture and high level of integration also allow it to be highly cost-efficient.