Telecom Lead America: Altair Semiconductor has launched two new baseband processors and a new radio chip — built on FourGee-3100/6202.
The new chipset — based on Altair’s 3rd generation SDR architecture — supports LTE Release-10 features.
It supports the emerging Carrier Aggregation (CA) for LTE-Advanced deployments.
The new chip family features wide frequency band span of 400-3800MHz with 6 concurrent LTE bands for both primary and diversity antennas, enabling global band combinations.
It boasts host and peripheral interfaces to support applications including smartphones, tablets, mobile hotspots, routers and M2M.
READ Mobile World Congress 2013 HERE
“The industry is rapidly adopting single mode LTE as the de-facto technology for implementing the ‘Internet of Things’, replacing 3G+4G functionality in devices with 4G-only capabilities,” said Eran Eshed, Co-Founder and VP Marketing of Altair.
Research firm Wireless 20/20 says unencumbered by the IPR, semiconductor and BOM costs associated with 2G/3G technologies, single mode LTE chipsets are able to reach price points not possible by 2G/3G/4G multi-mode solutions. This provides incentives for service providers and equipment vendors to embed LTE in devices otherwise not possible with multi-mode solutions.
Meanwhile, Strategy Analytics says Qualcomm is leading the cellular baseband processor market with 52 percent revenue share in 2012.
Driven by 4G / LTE, the global cellular baseband processor market registered 18 percent year-on-year growth to reach $17.8 billion.
Besides Qualcomm, the other top cellular baseband processor suppliers include MediaTek, Intel, Broadcom and ST-Ericsson.
