Chipmaker Sequans Communications announced at Mobile World Congress today that its first LTE-Advanced chip will be sampling next quarter.
The SQN3220, which is part of Sequans’ Cassiopeia platform, supports 3GPP Release 10 specifications and delivers carrier aggregation of 40 MHz total bandwidth.
“The key feature is extremely flexible carrier aggregation, allowing combination of any two carriers of any size up to 20 MHz each, contiguous or non-contiguous, inter-band or intra-band, for an overall total of 40 MHz of bandwidth,” said Georges Karam. “Sequans CEO Cassiopeia’s unique implementation of carrier aggregation gives operators the ability to get the most value possible from their LTE spectrum—even the smallest slices.”
Cassiopeia also supports other Release 10 enhancements such as new MIMO schemes, enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (eICIC) schemes for heterogeneous networks (HetNet), and improvements to eMBMS (evolved multimedia broadcast multicast service) or LTE Broadcast.
Sequans eMBMS technology supports multiple concurrent sessions for multicast traffic along with unicast traffic, on both TDD and FDD networks, and also provides a standardized interface to third party eMBMS middleware, the company noted.
Karam said Sequans will be participating in LTE-Advanced trials with mobile operators beginning next quarter. The company is also conducting interoperability testing and performance optimizations of the Cassiopeia platform in collaboration with infrastructure vendors and test equipment suppliers, including Alcatel-Lucent and Agilent technologies.
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