Wintegra and Altair Partner to Expand WiMAX and LTE Ecosystem

Wintegra Inc., and Altair Semiconductorannounced a technology partnership aimed at accelerating the adoption of interoperable mobile WiMAX base station and customer premise equipment (CPE) technologies. Altair is a fabless chip company developing the world's most advanced 4G semiconductors for handheld devices.

The collaboration between the two companies will involve the exchange of hardware, software and expertise to facilitate more rapid adoption of the latest 802.16e mobility features, including throughput and power control, performance optimizing multiple input multiple output (MIMO) and advanced antenna system (AAS) technology in a mobile environment.

Through this partnership, Wintegra and Altair will ensure interoperability of their WiMAX and LTE product lines, which enables mutual customers to achieve a more rapid market acceptance of their solutions.

The two companies intend to continue their close co-operation at an engineering level, and are already collaborating on LTE development and interoperability plans that will allow the Wintegra silicon and software targeted at LTE base station designs to work with Altair’s new technology targeted at LTE CPE equipment.

Wintegra also offers a complete WiMAX and LTE base station development and reference platform, the WinHDP2, that scales from picocell to multi-sector macrocell densities using the Wintegra WinPath2 family of fully programmable, pin-compatible and software-compatible processors and the picoChip pc203 family of physical layers (PHY).

Altair’s recently launched mobile WiMAX chipset, the ALT2150, is the first in a family of chipsets crafted to achieve excellent modem performance, while consuming a fraction of the power of any mobile WiMAX chipset available today and at a much smaller size. The company's products provide handheld device manufacturers that are integrating 4G technologies into their products with a highly power-optimized, robust and cost-effective solution.

“We are very pleased to be partnering with Wintegra for WiMAX interoperability as the company’s solution becomes one of the standard WiMAX technologies in this emerging market,” said Eran Eshed, vice president of marketing and business development, and a co-founder of Altair Semiconductor. “The widespread adoption of the Wintegra 802.16e media access control (MAC) and transport solutions in the industry and the flexibility and scalability of their technology makes Wintegra a natural partner for us to qualify our WiMAX CPE platform technology.”

With WiBro and WiMAX customers in China, Europe, India, Japan, Korea, the Middle East, North America and Taiwan, and as new standards come forward, Wintegra enables the worldwide adoption of advanced communication protocols and emerging standards through an innovative mix of software and silicon technologies that support field upgrades.

“Altair provides leading edge CPE silicon technology, as proven with the development of the ALT2150, and is expected to offer one of the most promising solutions for handheld designs,” said Eran Kirzner, director of engineering for wireless systems at Wintegra. “Working closely with Altair provides Wintegra and our customers with high confidence that the resulting base stations will be fully interoperable with the next generation WiMAX handset.”