Integrating Release 13 Power Consumption Features Provides Extended Battery Life.
Altair Semiconductor, today announced that it has teamed up with NTT DOCOMO, Japan’s largest mobile services provider, to demo ultra-low-power consumption using LTE extended discontinuous reception (eDRX) functionality on CAT-1 devices.
The collaboration will also include Altair’s participation in the DOCOMO R&D Open House 2016, taking place November 17-18 at DOCOMO’s R&D Center in Japan.
The announcement follows NTT DOCOMO’s recent chipset interoperability testing completion of Altair’s ALT1160 CAT-1 chipset.
Toshiyuki Futakata, Vice President and Senior Manager of NTT DOCOMO, Communication Device Development Department, Radio Access Technology Group, said:
“We are excited to test our LPWA IoT gateway with lower-category LTE technologies, for a solution that targets more than 10 years of battery life.”
“Altair has consistently proven itself a valuable partner for forward-thinking, power-optimized LTE solutions and we look forward to collaborating on this project.”
Power saving mode (PSM), as specified by 3GPP Release 12, allows devices to connect to the network only as needed, preserving battery life by remaining in sleep mode. Similarly, eDRX functionality, part of the new Release 13 standards, enables further power improvement by allowing IoT devices to remain inactive for long periods and yet remain registered and accessible to network initiated communication. This reduces the amount of power required and extends battery life significantly.
Eran Eshed, Co-founder and VP of Worldwide Sales and Marketing for Altair, said:
“The CAT-1 standard doesn’t provide unique power reduction techniques. However, with Release 13, eDRX can exhibit very low current consumption on IoT devices.”
“NTT DOCOMO is well-known as an innovator and we are glad to extend our longstanding partnership and demonstrate such advanced cellular IoT capabilities.”
