Altair Semiconductor

Altair was founded in May 2005 by former Texas Instruments executives Oded Melamed, Yigal Bitran, and Eran Eshed, with extensive broadband and Wireless silicon experience. Altair's management and technology executives were among the founding team of Libit Signal Processing, a fabless chip company acquired by Texas Instruments in 1999 for $365 million.

As of 2013, Altair was privately held, and had raised in excess of $120M financing.

The company has a long history of developing 4G semiconductor solutions and prior to strategically shifting full focus to 3GPP LTE in 2006, had developed solutions for WiMAX and Japanese XGP standards. In January 2016 it was announced that Sony was acquiring Altair for $212 Million.

In 2019, Nohik Semel became the CEO of the company, replacing Oded Melamed.

In 2025, Sony Israel was split-off from Sony International and was re-renamed to Altair Semiconductor. Sony announced that a "substantial" share of ownership was transferred to employees.

Market

LTE has emerged as the de facto 4G (4th Generation) technology, after having won the battle over rival technology WiMAX, which failed to gain global carrier acceptance and critical deployment mass. As data usage minutes are on a steep increase vector, and voice ARPU (Average revenue per user) remain flat, carriers face a need to offer advanced and cost effective mobile broadband services which will offset the profitability decline and increase customer satisfaction.

According to the Global Mobile Suppliers Association (GSA), 338 telecoms operators in 101 countries have committed to commercial LTE network deployments or are engaged in trials, technology testing or studies. LTE networks are already fully deployed in key markets such as the U.S. and South Korea. Analysts forecast the number of LTE subscribers worldwide to reach 1B subscribers by 2016.

In addition to connecting the consumer device market, LTE has the potential to push forward the vision of the Internet of Things (IoT). As of 2013, the internet had about 10–15 billion devices connected to it. Industry experts predict some 25 billion devices will be connected by 2015, and 50 billion by 2020. Many of these connections, whether consumer, enterprise, industrial, or other will require Wireless Wide Area Network (WWAN) connections, and given the connectivity requirements, a majority of these connection could be via LTE networks.

Products

Altair's product portfolio includes baseband processors, multi-band RF transceivers, and a range of reference hardware and product level protocol stack software conforming to 3GPP LTE standards.