Israeli Startup Altair Semiconductors announced today the availability of their LTE baseband processor. Named FourGee-3100, this is the first in a series of LTE portfolio.
This is Altair’s 3rd chip following the FourGee-2150 for Mobile wiMAX and FourGee-4150 for XGP. I don’t believe the FourGee-2150 is widely deployed nor gained siginificant design wins, but as reported earlier, the FourGee-4150 XGP powers Japanese Willcom new XGP network .
Altair announced their plans for:
- FourGee(TM)-6150 – a MIMO RF transceiver that supports LTE-TDD. This product will be available in August 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
LTE-FDD will arrive in Q2, 2010, long after trials are expected to start in Japan. Will Altair gain enough market share with the LTE-TDD? We shall soon find out.