Hod HaSharon, Israel – March 22, 2011 – Altair Semiconductor (www.altair-semi.com), the world's leading developer of ultra-low power, small footprint and high performance LTE chipsets, announced today that its Band Class 12 solution, combining Altair's 4G LTE chipsets and Alcatel-Lucent's LTE infrastructure, has successfully completed a three-month field trial with a large US wireless carrier and is now commercially available. 

Altair's solution is the first and only Band Class 12-compliant, commercially ready, LTE chipset solution in the industry. 

During the Band Class 12 trial, the trial system, comprised of Altair's chipset and Alcatel Lucent's infrastructure, demonstrated the ability to practically eliminate RF interference, achieved very high throughputs, and optimized the system's end to end performance. 

"The excellent trial results not only prove that Band Class 12 is suitable for commercial deployment of LTE systems, but also reassures carriers that the heavy investment made in the spectrum can be monetized effectively," said Eran Eshed, Co-Founder and VP of Marketing and Business Development at Altair. "We look forward to working together with leading U.S. carriers towards rolling out the first commercial products later this year." 

Due to powerful radio frequency (RF) interference, from sources such as terrestrial digital broadcast TV and MediaFlo, Band Class 12's spectral efficiency has been severely hampered. Using the unique capabilities of its SDR-based processor architecture, Altair developed and implemented cutting edge algorithmic solutions to dramatically improve and optimize the Band Class 12 spectrum usage. 

"Given the unique interference challenges that exist in Band Class 12, Alcatel-Lucent was seeking a chipset provider with exceptional RF and signal processing expertise, as well as a flexible and highly programmable processor architecture," said Doug Wolff, Vice President, LTE End to End Solutions, of Alcatel-Lucent. "The result was a successful trial that leveraged the innovation and extensive LTE expertise of both Altair and Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent's research arm." 

Band Class 12 licensees include North American carriers, such as Cox Communications, Cellular South, US Cellular and others. 

Altair's FourGee-3100 is a 3GPP LTE baseband processor that supports LTE category 3 (CAT-3) throughputs (100Mbps/50Mbps DL/UL respectively). The chip implements a 20MHz MIMO receiver and is based on a proprietary O2P™ Software Defined Radio (SDR) processor which offers performance that significantly exceeds traditional communications DSP cores, yet consumes a fraction of the power. The chipset supports FDD as well as TDD versions of the LTE standard and has undergone extensive interoperability testing (IOT) with major infrastructure vendors. 

The company's FourGee-6200 is a high-performance, wideband FDD/TDD radio IC which covers any 3GPP LTE frequency band in the range between 700-2700MHz. The combined chipset offers terminal manufacturers a truly global solution.