Altair Semiconductors enters the Cellular IoT Chipsets

18 February, 2017

"The ALT1250 is the evidence that cellular technologies are not only superior in functionality, reliability and security, but are also as cost-efficient or more compared to non-cellular options."

Altair Semiconductor, joins the IoT over Cellular trend with its ALT1250, a narrowband CAT-M1 and NB1 (NB-IoT) chipset for the cellular IoT connectivity space, featuring global band support, advanced security and location capabilities far surpassing the functionality of existing chipsets.

Oded Melamed, Co-founder and CEO

“With carriers expected to begin operating IoT services on CAT-M1 and NB1 networks by the middle of the year, the new ALT1250 comes at the right time,” said Eran Eshed, Co-founder and VP of Worldwide Sales and Marketing for Altair. “It possesses the much anticipated combination of features, power and cost required to support massive roll out of such services. We’ve taken a fresh look at what the market expects from us, and produced the most integrated, feature rich and cost-optimized chipset we’ve ever developed.”

Compact IoT solution with GPS inside

The ALT1250’s extreme level of integration eliminates most of the external components required to design a cellular IoT module. IT is a highly integrated device and incorporates an LTE base band processor, RFIC, PMU, memory, Power Amplifiers, filters and antenna switch, as well as a GNSS and a cellular based location engine and MCU subsystem for customer developed. The ALT1250-based design requires only a few external components, enabling miniature module sizes of less than 100mm2.

The chip incorporates Altair’s OneSKUTM  RF technology for multiple LTE band combinations with a single hardware design and a variety of modes, including 3GPP PSM and eDRX, enabling more than 10 years of battery life.

“Altair’s new ALT1250 chipset is a true Low Power Wide Area solution for IoT,” said Philippe Guillemette, CTO for Sierra Wireless. “We believe the ALT1250 will provide us with that kind of a competitive edge, on top of which we can build our added value and features to meet our customers’ needs.”

“Cellular technologies are superior”

“This chipset is a real game-changer,” added Eshed. “The long debate is over regarding how competitive cellular chipsets can be compared to proprietary LPWA. The ALT1250 is the evidence that cellular technologies are not only superior in functionality, reliability and security, but are also as cost-efficient or more compared to non-cellular options.”

Altair, an Israel-based company from the city of Hod Hasharon, owns modem chip technology and related software for LTE (Long Term Evolution), a 4G cellular standard for mobile devices. Altair develops and sells products focused on LTE technology, and its modem chips stand out for their low power consumption, high performance and competitive cost. On January 2016 Altair was acquired Sony Corporation for 212 million U.S. dollars.

 

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Posted in: News , Semiconductors , Wireless

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