By: Zewde Yeraswork
Altair Semiconductor announced an LTE-Advanced baseband processor in the run up to this month’s Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona. The Four Gee 3802 is the Israeli company’s third LTE design.
A former supporter of WiMax technology, the company is now investing heavily in LTE technology and trying to push down the price of the technology. Its rivals include heavyweights such as Qualcomm and smaller firms including Sequans.
The Four Gee 3802 is compliant with the 3GPP LTE Release 10 specifications and software upgradable to Release 11, thanks to Altair’s software-defined radio (SDR) architecture. The chip supports category 6 throughputs of up to 300 MBits/second using an 800 MHz CPU subsystem. It also supports carrier aggregation of 20 MHz channels and high definition Voice over LTE.
“Having shipped and deployed millions of LTE baseband/RF chips on the world’s largest LTE networks, we believe our products set the benchmark for maturity, performance and cost,” said Eran Eshed, the company’s co-founder and vice president of marketing and business development, in a statement.
The FourGee 3800 is already shipping to Altair customers. The device will go into volume production in the second half of 2014.