Altair Semiconductor
Israeli company

Altair Semiconductor, formerly known as Sony Semiconductor Israel, is an Israeli developer of high performance single-mode Long Term Evolution (LTE) chipsets. The company's product portfolio includes baseband processors, RF transceivers and a range of reference hardware products. Founded in 2005, Altair employs 190 employees in its Hod Hasharon, Israel headquarters and R&D center, and has regional offices in the United States, Japan, China, India, Finland, and France. Altair Semiconductor was the first chipset vendor to receive certification from Verizon Wireless to run on its 4G LTE network. Altair has also powered several devices launched on Verizon's network including the Ellipsis 7 tablet and HP Chromebook 11.6" LTE. In January 2016, it was announced that Sony was acquiring Altair for $212 Million. Altair was renamed Sony Semiconductor Israel on 29 March 2020.
Corporate history
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.
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The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4736095. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2005, 2016, 2020 and 1999.
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