Company
SEQUANS COMMUNICATIONS is a leading 4G chip maker, supplying LTE and WiMAX chips to wireless equipment and device manufacturers worldwide. Founded in 2003 to address the WiMAX opportunity where it is now a global leader, Sequans expanded in 2009 to address the LTE market. Sequans’ chips are inside the world’s major WiMAX networks and are now beginning to appear in LTE networks. Sequans is based in Paris, with additional offices throughout the world, including USA, United Kingdom, Israel, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, and Taiwan.
BACKGROUND
Georges Karam, CEO, and a team of broadband experts from Alcatel and Pacific Broadband founded Sequans in September 2003 to address the WiMAX market. The team comprises expertise in wireless, systems, silicon, software, complex ASIC design, advanced signal processing, MAC protocol, scheduling algorithms, RFIC, and MIMO.
Sequans’ fixed WiMAX chips for base stations and subscriber stations based on the 802.16d standard became available in September 2004. Full SOCs became available in September 2005 with reference designs WiMAX Forum Certified™ in January 2006. Over the next three years, Sequans went on to develop and release two waves of Mobile WiMAX technology, based on the 802.16e standard, and then launched its LTE program in 2009. As of today, Sequans, one of the industry’s most experienced providers of 4G semiconductor solutions, has released four generations of WiMAX technology and two of LTE.
Sequans’ latest generation of WiMAX semiconductor solutions, the SQN1200 series, introduced in 2009, integrate baseband and triple band RF in a single die. SQN1200 series chips are now powering some of the WiMAX industry’s most popular 4G devices, such as the HTC EVO smartphones and tablets now available on the networks of Sprint, KDDI, and Korea Telecom. SQN1200 series technology is the WiMAX industry’s most advanced and most highly-integrated Mobile WiMAX silicon.
Sequans publicly announced the establishment of its LTE program in September of 2009 and shortly thereafter was selected by China Mobile to provide technology for its TD-LTE demonstration network to be deployed at the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai. This first generation LTE technology of Sequans is now operating two commercial LTE networks as well as numerous trial networks on five continents. In 2011, Sequans unveiled its second generation LTE technology. These new generation solutions are comprehensive and support all global LTE networks, both TDD and FDD.
