Altair Delivers Half-Energy WiMax Chips

Altair Semiconductor is not a name you usually see in the news. However, the fabless chip company claims that it managed to take a huge leap in the WiMax technology: world’s smallest and most power-efficient mobile WiMAX processor.

According to the company, the Altair ALT2150 comes with integrated Wave-2 physical and Media Access Control (MAC) functionality, as well as other important boosts in performance. The most important aspect of the chip is its impressive energy efficiency, that allows it to cut down power requirements by about 50 percent.

"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.

The company's WiMax chip is especially suitable for inclusion in the next generation of mobile devices and handheld computing systems that will be powered by a battery. The company has also replaced the conventional Digital Signal Processor (DSP) with a proprietary OFDMA processor (referred to as O2P), that can be extensively programmed.

At the moment, multiple companies are offering WiMax baseband processors. For instance, Sequans CPE claims that its chip offers an industry-leading power consumption of 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."

In contrast, Altair's new WiMax offering would only take 142 milliwatts when working at peak capacity, while usually draining less than 100 milliwatts of power for mundane wireless tasks, such as VoIP calls or streaming video.

According to the chip's technical specifications, the mobile WiMax processor only takes up 142mW for uploading data at 1Mbps, 125mW for streaming H.264 video, 81mW for a VoIP call and 98mW in standby mode.

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