Korea Telecom taps Altair for ultra-low power LTE connectivity of smart meter, GPS tracking and power-save mode use cases

Korea Telecom taps Altair for ultra-low power LTE connectivity of smart meter, GPS tracking and power-save mode use cases

Leading Service Provider Illustrates Multi-Year Battery Life of True IoT-Optimized CAT-1 Chipset.

Altair Semiconductor, a leading provider of LTE chipsets, today announced its FourGee-1160 Category 1 (CAT-1) chipset has been selected by Korea Telecom (KT) to provide ultra-low power LTE connectivity for three Internet of Things (IoT) use cases on exhibit at the “KT Internet of Small Things” Event in Korea last week.

Byungkyun Kim, PhD, Vice President of Device Business Unit, KT, said:

“This Korea Telecom/Altair Semiconductor demonstration, is designed to show how mature LTE CAT-1 is, and to illustrate several typical use cases – among the many – that this IoT connectivity technology enables.”

“We partnered with Altair as they have the only CAT-1 chipset platform that is able to meet our aggressive power and feature requirements. We are looking forward to expanding the strategic collaboration with Altair as this technology commercializes.”

Altair’s FourGee-1160 is the first chipset designed and optimized exclusively for LTE CAT-1 operation. It features ultra-low power consumption, support for a variety of typical host/peripheral interfaces, an embedded power management unit and a flexible application layer with hardware based security. The chipset has been adopted by numerous M2M/IoT module and device makers and is expected to ship commercially by the end of this year.

“The versatility of the FourGee-1160’s architecture allows it to be used for a wide range of applications, such as these three that KT demonstrated at the event. At the same time, the common denominator is ultra-low power consumption, which today only Altair can offer in a CAT-1 chipset,” said Eran Eshed, Co-founder and VP of Marketing and Business Development for Altair. “Smart gas or water meters, for example, require up to a 10-year battery to make good business sense. The 1160 was built for exactly these kinds of applications.”

One unique feature of Altair’s Four-Gee-1160 CAT-1 chipset is Power-Save Mode (PSM), which enables terminals to enter a deep-sleep mode for long periods of time after notifying the base station. This reduces significantly the amount of power associated with frequent communication requests normally sent by the base station. PSM is a crucial element of many IoT/M2M applications, including smart metering, smart city and telematics.

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