14 DAY TRIAL // On Monday, Chinese chip maker MediaTek announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas its first LTE modem platform, namely the MT6290.
The new product will arrive on the market with full support for MediaTek SOCs, including the octa-core MT6592 processor that was launched in the fourth quarter of the last year.
The new chip is a LTE Release 9 Category 4 modem built using the 28nm process, and features baseband processor based on the Coresonic SIMT architecture.
According to the company, the new product is already being tested at wireless carriers around the world, and the first devices to include it are expected to become available for purchase in the second quarter of the year.
“The supporting RF chip in the platform is called MT6169 which supports up to 8 primary RF inputs (3 high bands, 2 mid bands, 3 low bands), plus another 8 RF inputs for diversity gains,” MediaTek explains.
“The RF chip supports more than 30 3GPP bands and is configurable to meet the RF band needs of mobile operators globally.”
MediaTek claims that its new MT6290 modem can offer LTE data rates of up to 150Mbit/s on the downlink, and up to 50Mbit/s on the uplink.
The company explains that the new chip comes with support for both FDD and TDD (Frequency Division Duplex and Time Division Duplex) modes of LTE, which ensures that devices will enjoy broad compatibility with mobile operator networks.
At the same time, the new modem comes with support for DC-HSPA+, W-CDMA, TD-SCDMA, EDGE, and GSM/GPRS radio technologies.
“We are pleased to unveil our first LTE modem platform at the CES show and seek to create a global market of mainstream LTE devices in collaboration with our mobile operator partners.” said Cheng-Te Chuang, head of Wireless Communications Technology Businesses Unit and vice president of MediaTek.
“The MT6290 is fully-compatible with the presently-available 3G mobile SOCs from MediaTek and our next-generation SOCs with LTE integration will be sampling throughout 2014.”
MediaTek’s early-adopter OEM partners have already received the MT6290 reference design, the company said. As mentioned above, devices featuring the new chip might arrive on the market as soon as the next quarter.