Altair launches chip for LTE wireless devices

* PC cards using chip to be available in Q1 2010

* Mobile handsets with chip to be sold in Q2

* LTE chip market seen at tens of millions of dlrs in 2011

By Tova Cohen

TEL AVIV, Sept 30 (Reuters) - Altair Semiconductor, an Israel-based developer of chips for fourth generation (4G) mobile phones, launched a baseband chip for next-generation mobile Long Term Evolution technology on Wednesday.

Telecom carriers are lining up infrastructure vendors as they prepare to launch LTE, which will enable faster uploads and downloads of movies, music and other data to mobile devices.

While telecom equipment makers such as Nokia Siemens [NSN.UL] have been selling LTE-ready base stations that can be upgraded with new software, terminals require special silicon, said Eran Eshed, Altair co-founder and vice president of marketing and business development.

"If you look across cellular rollouts, terminals have been the limiting factor," Eshed told Reuters.

The terminals being used for LTE trials are boxes the size of a home coffee machine that cannot test mobility as they need to be connected to a power supply.

Vendors such as Qualcomm (QCOM.O) and ST-Ericsson have said they are working on chipsets or have samples but the products are not yet on the market, he said.

"We are offering the first, or one of the first, commercial reference designs for a PC card. You can take our chipset that covers any varient of LTE, plug it into a laptop and start testing," Eshed said.

The first PC cards with Altair's chips will be on the market in the first quarter of 2010 while mobile phones with the chips will be available in the second quarter.

"We already have customers developing handsets based on this silicon," Eshed said.

The PC cards will enable Internet access anywhere at download speeds of 100 megabits per second and upload speeds of 50. This compares with speeds of just a few megabits with current 3G cards.

The first handsets will support LTE as well as third generation (3G) networks as coverage at first will be limited.

"LTE will start from being a data pipe that you can access the Internet through while voice calls will still go through traditional cellular. With time you will see the migration of voice calls from 2G and 3G to LTE but that will take time," Eshed said, estimating this would happen in 2013-2014.

Altair had more than $10 million in revenue last year and expects to surpass that level this year.

Eshed estimated the global market for LTE chipsets at a few tens of millions of dollars in 2011.

Eshed said Altair was fully committed to continuing to invest in their existing chips for the alternative technology known as WiMAX. But in the long run LTE will be more significant for the company, he said.

"I am positively surprised with the pace that LTE technology is being commercialised. We see real and concrete trial activity from operators like Verizon and NTT DoCoMo, both expect to have paying subscribers before the end of 2010 ... It will exceed the pace of 3G or even 2G." (Editing by Dan Lalor)