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Agilent Technologies, Altair Semiconductor Team Up to Accelerate LTE Device and Test Equipment Maturity

11th February 2011

Keysight Technologies (formerly Agilent)

ES Admin

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Agilent and Altair Semiconductor today announced they will jointly conduct interoperability testing and validation testing using Altair's 4G LTE chipset in conjunction with the Agilent PXT wireless communications test set and N6070A-series signaling conformance test software. The joint effort will accelerate the development of LTE devices and testing solutions into new operating bands.

/> Altair's LTE chip portfolio includes the FourGee-3100 baseband and FourGee-6200 RFIC chipsets. The FourGee-3100 is a 3GPP LTE baseband processor that supports LTE category 3 throughputs (100Mbps/50Mbps DL/UL respectively). The chip implements a 20-MHz MIMO receiver and is based on a proprietary, cutting-edge O2P software-defined radio processor. The processor offers performance that significantly exceeds traditional communications DSP cores, yet consumes a fraction of the power. The FourGee-6200 is a multiband RF transceiver that supports any 3GPP LTE band in the range of 700 MHz to 2700 MHz. The chipset supports FDD as well as TDD versions of the LTE standard and, together with Altair's software stack, has been extensively interoperability-tested with leading infrastructure vendors in multiple-band and duplex configurations.

Having a prestigious test equipment vendor like Agilent on board for interoperability testing is of huge importance to Altair, said Eran Eshed, cofounder and VP of Marketing and Business Development at Altair Semiconductor. Verifying and certifying leading-edge designs is always a challenge, and this collaboration ensures that the chipset technology and the testing solutions move forward together at an accelerated pace, allowing our products to be brought to market quickly and efficiently.

Our work with Altair lends to our on-going interoperability testing with the PXT and validation of Agilent's conformance test solutions, said Guy Séné, vice president and general manager of Agilent's Microwave and Communications Division. Altair's chipset will be used to further increase the capability of our LTE test platforms, expanding our design verification and conformance test capability into new operating bands.

As network operators introduce LTE into new spectrum allocations, new end-user devices must be certified using a test platform that has been validated for each frequency-band, bandwidth and duplex arrangement (FDD and TDD). In addition to interoperability testing, the Altair chipset will be used for validation of 3GPP test cases