Today, Altair Semiconductor announced that its FourGee-3100/6200 chipset successfully completed TD/FDD LTE live handover testing with Rohde & Schwarz. It allows two LTE duplex modes to operate interchangeably on the same device, as well as enabling global LTE roaming, which has significant market implications says Altair.
Altair says it is the first chipset manufacturer to achieve live TD/FDD LTE handover in commercially available devices. Altair’s chipsets can be found in approximately 30 end-user devices – ranging from USB dongles to smartphones – built by its more than 15 customers across North America, Europe, China, India and Taiwan.
Broadcom’s $316 million acquisition of Beceem leaves other baseband start-ups Icera, Altair Semiconductor, Sequans and Wavesat as potential acquisition targets for established baseband / chipset vendors looking to expand into LTE, says Strategy Analytics, in an October 2010 report. Sequans raised $77 million in an initial public offering last year.
