Company
SEQUANS COMMUNICATIONS is a world-leading 4G chipmaker, supplying LTE and WiMAX chips to equipment manufacturers and mobile operators globally. Founded in 2004 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 leading WiMAX networks and will soon be inside the world’s leading LTE networks. Sequans is based in Paris, with additional offices throughout the world, including USA, United Kingdom, Israel, Japan, Hong Kong, 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.
Mobile WiMAX Wave 1 chips, based on the 802.16e standard, were introduced in 2006 and became WiMAX Forum Certified™ in April, and Mobile WiMAX Wave 2 chips were introduced in 2007 and WiMAX Forum Certified in June of 2008. All chips are now deployed in volume with tier 1 and 2 TEMs worldwide. Sequans RF chips, one for 2.5 GHz and one for 3.5 GHz, were introduced in December of 2007. The SQN1170, the first single package baseband plus RF solution was introduced in June of 2008.
Sequans’ newest generation chip series, the SQN1200 family, the industry’s first 65nm solution integrating baseband and triple band RF in a single die, was introduced in 2009. The SQN1210 chip for mobile devices was introduced in February, and the SQN1220 featuring extra processing power for VOIP and CPE applications followed in July. Sequans’ SQN1200 series of chips 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. Shortly following in November, Sequans disclosed that Alcatel-Lucent and Motorola had invested in its LTE development program. In December, Sequans announced that China Mobile had selected Sequans to provide LTE chips and USB dongles for its TD-LTE demonstration network.
