Altair, Alcatel-Lucent okay LTE chipset

LONDON – Mobile communications chip company Altair Semiconductor Ltd. has announced that a combination of its FourGee 4G-LTE chipset and Alcatel-Lucent infrastructure has completed a three-month field trial with a U.S. wireless carrier and is now commercially available.

Altair (Hod Hasharon, Israel) described the combination as a Band Class 12 solution. Band Class 12 is thought to refer to the carrier frequency spectrum between 728-MHz and 746-MHz. Licensees of Band Class 12 include North American carriers, such as Cox Communications, Cellular South, US Cellular and others. Altair goes on to claim its chipset is the first and only Band Class 12-compliant, commercially ready LTE chipset in the industry.

Due to radio frequency interference, from sources such as terrestrial digital broadcast TV and MediaFlo, Band Class 12's spectral efficiency has been severely hampered, Altair said. Altair's chipset is able to extract signals and improve Band Class 12 spectrum usage, the company said.

"The excellent trial results not only prove that Band Class 12 is suitable for commercial deployment of LTE systems, but also reassures carriers that the heavy investment made in the spectrum can be monetized effectively," said Eran Eshed, co-founder and vice president of marketing and business development at Altair.

"Given the unique interference challenges that exist in Band Class 12, Alcatel-Lucent was seeking a chipset provider with exceptional RF and signal processing expertise, as well as a flexible and highly programmable processor architecture," said Doug Wolff, vice president, LTE end-to-end solutions, of Alcatel-Lucent. "The result was a successful trial that leveraged the innovation and extensive LTE expertise of both Altair and Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent's research arm."

Altair's FourGee-6200 is a FDD/TDD radio IC which covers any 3GPP LTE frequency band in the range between 700-MHz and 2700-MHz. The FourGee-3100 is a 3GPP LTE baseband processor that supports LTE category 3 throughputs of 100Mbps downlink and 50Mbps uplink. The chip implements a 20-MHz bandwidth MIMO receiver and is based on a proprietary Software Defined Radio processor. The chipset supports FDD as well as TDD versions of the LTE standard.


Related links and articles:

www.altair-semi.com

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