US mobile chip company Altair Semiconductor has unveiled plans to expand its next-generation chipset portfolio with 3GPP LTE technology. The new 3GPP LTE products will include an LTE baseband processor, a MIMO RF transceiver chip and a multi-band LTE-FDD MIMO transceiver designed to support worldwide LTE frequency bands and duplex-modes. Altair Semiconductor will launch its LTE product portfolio during 2009 and 2010.

Altair Semiconductor, a fabless chip company developing the world's most advanced 4G mobile semiconductors for handheld devices, today announced its 3GPP LTE product roadmap, which includes a baseband processor, and complementing MIMO RF transceiver chips designed to support world-wide LTE bands and duplex-modes.

"The cellular chipset market is very competitive, so it is an essential strategy for chip companies to own as wide a portfolio of baseband processors and RF transceivers as possible, in order to offer turn-key solutions to their customers," said Oded Melamed, CEO of Altair Semiconductor. "LTE technology has numerous combinations of frequency bands and duplex methods in different markets and regions. Being able to support those various combinations is one of Altair's key differentiators."

Altair's LTE chipsets are developed using the company's proprietary and market-proven O2P(TM) software-defined 4G processor architecture, which offers extremely high performance at unmatched power consumption levels. This technology is currently deployed in Altair's FourGee(TM)-2150 for mobile WiMAX, and FourGee(TM)-4150, for XGP, both recognized as leaders in their respective markets for high performance and power efficiency.

Altair's LTE product portfolio is comprised of:
* FourGee(TM)-3100 - a fully optimized LTE CAT-3 baseband processor that in addition to LTE supports other 4G/OFDM technology variants, including WiMAX and XGP and will be available in Q409. The chip is bundled with a complete LTE protocol stack which includes PHY, MAC, RLC, PDCP, RRC and NAS layers.
* FourGee(TM)-6150 - a MIMO RF transceiver that supports LTE-TDD. This product will be available in mid-2009.
* FourGee(TM)-6200 - a multi-band LTE-FDD MIMO transceiver that supports the most popular LTE bands in North America, Japan and Europe. The chip will be available in Q210.

"The flexibility of Altair's chips and our experience with other 4G technologies enable us to bring our LTE products to market more quickly and with less capital investment than other companies in the space," said Eran Eshed, Co-Founder and VP of Marketing and Business Development for Altair. "By leveraging our existing, successful technology, we are able to deliver one of the first and most advanced commercial-grade LTE chips to the market."