Altair Offers 4G LTE Baseband Chip - EETimes

Altair Offers 4G LTE Baseband Chip
EETimes
By Peter Clarke

Oct. 1, 2009

Altair Semiconductor Ltd. (Hod Hasharon, Israel), a 4G communications chip company, has announced the commercial availability of its LTE baseband chip, the FourGee-3100.

The FourGee-3100 is an LTE CAT-3 baseband processor that operates with devices from mobile handsets, data cards, USB dongles and customer premises equipment to various handheld consumer electronics devices. The chip is supplied bundled with an LTE L1 and protocol stack.

With Altair's LTE RF transceiver, the FourGee-6150, also currently commercially available, Altair provides 4G mobile device makers with a baseband and RF LTE chipset. Altair's LTE baseband is architected using the company's proprietary O2P software-defined 4G processor.

"Starting from today, device OEM and ODMs are able to build commercial grade LTE terminals without having to compromise on performance, power consumption or size of the LTE chipset," said Oded Melamed, co-founder and CEO of Altair, in a statement.

The chip supports data rates of 100-Mbits per second down link and 50-Mbits per second uplink, two 20-MHz MIMO receive chains and one transmit chain, and also supports other 4G/OFDM technology variants, including WiMax and XGP.

Altair did not indicate where it is getting the chip made or how much it intends to charge for each one.