Altair Semiconductor, a fabless chip company, says it has developed the world’s smallest and most power-efficient mobile WiMAX processor.
The Altair ALT2150 implements full Wave-2 physical and Media Access Control (MAC) functionality, and offers substantial performance enhancements beyond this profile says the company.
“The ALT2150 is not just another WiMAX baseband processor — it represents a true disruption in terms of power consumption, size and cost,” said Eran Eshed, Altair’s co-founder and vice president of Marketing and Business Development.
Altair’s product strategy is unique in that it has an exclusive focus on battery-operated, handheld devices. Rather than choosing to integrate a conventional Digital Signal Processor (DSP), Altair developed a proprietary, highly programmable OFDMA processor (codenamed O2P).
Sequans CPE chip claims an industry leading 280 milliwatts of power. “That’s impressive”, said Altair co-founder Eran Eshed, “but it’s still four times more than what Wi-Fi chip uses, and people are still complaining that Wi-Fi drains too much power.” Altair says its chip will drain 142 milliwatts at peak capacity, but will consume less than 100 milliwatts for most order data functions, such as making a VoIP call or streaming video.
Altair’s Mobile WiMAX chip uses only 142mW for a 1Mbps FTP upload, 125mW for a Streaming H.264 video, 81mW – VoIP call and 98mW in standby mode which is said to equate with one hour of battery operation and about half that of competitors Beceem and Sequans.
In other WiMAX news:
- Beceem is working with Clearwire in Portland, one of the largest mobile WiMAX network trials in the country, encompassing approximately 145 square miles and more than 40 base stations.
- Sprint plans to give investors an update during its first-quarter earnings call regarding its WiMax capital spending plans. “When we get to the first quarter earnings call we’ll probably have some kind of update on capital spending and Xohm,” an executive for the company said during a Webcast at an investor conference today.
- Airspan Networks has entered into a global marketing agreement with Gilat Satellite Networks (pdf). Gilat operates Spacenet, which provides managed services in North America for businesses and governments, and Connexstar, for consumers.
- Airspan Networks announced that Tricom, one of the Dominican Republic ’s leading carriers, has awarded Airspan an expansion contract to continue to supply its WiMAX solutions in the licensed 3.5 GHz frequency band. This latest award would bring the value of Airspan contribution to Tricom’s network to approximately $1.7 million. Airspan began supplying Tricom with its WiMAX solutions in the fourth quarter of 2007, using its HiperMAX-2 and Hiper-Micro base stations.
- The latest ABI Research ranking for WiMAX equipment vendors listed Samsung at the top with Motorola and Cisco in the second and third spots.
