Altair 4G OFDM Chips

I recently spoke with Altair, which is an Israeli company that is building OFDM chips to support both WiMAX and LTE. It is focusing on 4G technologies by building handset chips. The company currently has chips for WiMAX and for XGP, which is an OFDM technology deployed by Willcom in Japan.

Altair plans to introduce an LTE chip in the middle of 2009 and a multimode chip by the end of 2009 that will support WiMAX, XGP, and LTE. This will enable support of all three technologies in a single hand held device. The company is also working with a 2G/3G supplier to offer the ability to add WiMAX, XGP, or LTE to a 2G/3G device using the Altair chip as a coprocessor.

This is interesting because it shows that progress is being made on chips that will facilitate the integration of 2G, 3G, and 4G WiMAX and LTE networks. This will help with the evolution of existing networks to WiMAX or LTE. It may also facilitate roaming between WiMAX and GSM, WCDMA, and LTE networks, which may keep WiMAX from becoming the dead end that CDMA has become.