Altair Semiconductor announced that its TD-LTE chipset, integrated in a commercial USB dongle, achieved download speeds of more than 100Mbps in a live over-the-air demonstration.

This achievement means the promise of LTE - that the user experience will be enhanced significantly by providing fast download times and data-intensive applications - is now a reality.

"We are very proud of this achievement, which allows our customers to strongly differentiate their products in the market," said Eran Eshed, Co-Founder and VP of Marketing and Business Development at Altair Semiconductor. "It is important to understand that this figure is achievable on any of the tens of thousands of Altair-based commercial terminals in the market, in most practical TD-LTE field deployment scenarios globally. This unique capability substantially upgrades the service offerings of TDD carriers and allows them to offer similar user experiences as FDD carriers."

The record 100Mbps sustained IP throughput was enabled by a much higher instantaneous peak throughput of 150Mbps. The demonstration used a commercial eNB in a standard TD-LTE configuration (Config-2), which is being used by carriers in numerous worldwide markets.

Altair, which is shipping one of the first commercial TDD/FDD LTE chipsets  in the market today, has established a strong leadership position in the emerging TD-LTE market. Altair's FourGee chipset is based on a proprietary high-performance, low power consumption SDR architecture - as opposed to standard DSP (Digital Signal Processor) architectures which are more common. In order to achieve such high throughputs, patent pending MIMO and channel estimation algorithms are employed over the SDR processor. The ability to continuously upgrade and enhance the SDR firmware to achieve such record speeds is a key strength of Altair's chipset architecture, and an important and very practical advantage for device makers and network operators.