Altair Semiconductor announced a demonstration with Ericsson, designed to illustrate LTE's Release 12 Power Save Mode (PSM) attributes of Altair's FourGee-1160 Cat-1/0 chipset within an Ericsson-populated infrastructure. The demo will take place at next week's Super Mobility Week event in Las Vegas. PSM, as specified by 3GPP Release 12, 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, and is a harbinger of some aspects of software-defined power under development for 5G communications networks.
"PSM is an excellent optimization tool for a variety of LTE power-conscious IoT applications," said Eran Eshed, VP of Marketing and Business Development at Altair. "We're trailblazing along with our ecosystem partners to bring these solutions to market. The FourGee-1160 is the only true Cat-1 chipset in the market today. It is now also the first to offer the PSM capability."
"Long battery life is a key enabler for large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) adoption, and what's typically being asked for is battery durations of 10 years or more. PSM is effectively addressing the challenge of battery life, enabling and optimizing a multitude of IoT use cases with relatively infrequent communication requirements between end points and the network. It is a software upgrade only on the existing LTE network," said Sebastian Tolstoy, Head of Radio Marketing and Communications at Ericsson. "This demo between Ericsson and Altair will highlight the dramatic gains PSM enables, in terms of battery time for applications like alarms, smart gas/water meters and other sensors."
