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Sony’s Altair

CUSTOMER CASE

How Sony’s Altair turns strict power design requirements into proven cellular modem reliability with Otii

Cellular IoT is surging – powering smart meters, agriculture, logistics, wearables, and connected health. It delivers coverage and reliability at scale, but one factor defines success: energy efficiency.

To deliver on the promise of longevity, Sony’s Altair focuses on ultra-efficient power management, supported by rigorous iteration and validation of its cellular IoT chipsets. Every design must meet strict internal specifications and prove the real-world reliability of its cellular modem platforms.

Balancing that level of reliability with development speed was a significant challenge – until the team introduced the Otii Product Suite across their workflows. The result? A multifold increase in testing capacity, a setup that’s scalable across teams, and a significant reduction in field issues.

Energy efficiency isn’t a feature – it’s a design requirement

When you are shipping cellular modems for long-life, battery-powered devices, proving your energy performance is just as important as achieving it.

Sony’s Altair is committed to ensuring its chipsets meet strict power consumption KPIs under real-world conditions. This required extensive validation across low-power states such as PSM and eDRX, firmware versions, simulating deployment scenarios, and confirming that energy usage remained predictable and consistent.

But scaling this process came with several constraints:

  • Limited access to high-end power measurement tools, which were expensive and shared across teams
  • Test bottlenecks, with engineers waiting for equipment or coordinating access to lab benches
  • Gaps in customer tooling, as many clients lacked the means to get the tools to measure power consumption accurately, making issue reproduction and optimization alignment difficult
  • Slower development cycles, as debugging and validation were limited, centralized, and hard to parallelize
  • Increased support load and risk, with power-related issues more likely to surface late in the cycle or after deployment.

To meet growing validation demands and maintain power performance control across product lines, Altair required a more scalable, accessible, and collaborative solution.

Sony Semiconductor Israel (Sony), formerly Altair Semiconductor, is a leading provider of Cellular IoT chipsets and AI for image sensing, playing a pivotal role in realizing the vision of the Internet of Things (IoT).

Altair ALT 1350 cellular IoT chipset and its applications

“Energy efficiency is not a feature, it is a design requirement that shapes every decision.”

— Igor Tovberg, Director, Product Marketing & Strategic Partnerships

Clearing the path: Breaking bottlenecks in development and sales

To scale their power validation process while increasing accessibility, flexibility, and collaboration across teams, Sony’s Altair integrated Otii instruments into their development and test workflows. Otii offered a cost-efficient, compact, and flexible alternative to traditional lab equipment, which typically serves only a single validation purpose.

Each engineer was equipped with their own Otii, removing bottlenecks and allowing power measurements to become part of daily development work. The Otii instruments served both as a precise power supply and a high-resolution power consumption analyzer, enabling accurate current profiling across critical cellular behaviors, including:

  • Low-power transitions, such as entry and exit from PSM and eDRX
  • Network activity, including connection setup and data transmission
  • Firmware variations, with power impacts traced across builds and configurations

Beyond internal use, Sony’s Altair encouraged adoption of Otii among its customers to streamline joint validation efforts. This brought key benefits:

  • Aligned tooling between Sony’s Altair and its customers, making it easier to reproduce field issues and collaborate on optimization
  • Faster feedback loops, with measurement data shared directly between teams
  • Consistent testing methodology, improving the reliability of power consumption KPIs across use cases
Otii power measurements of Sony Altair ALT1350 chipset

“With Otii, we went from test bottlenecks to fast, parallel validation. Our entire team can now optimize and debug independently, while staying aligned with our customers; that’s a huge win”

— Igor Tovberg, Director, Product Marketing & Strategic Partnerships

When a low-power mindset proves its value

With Otii, Sony’s Altair transformed its power validation into a scalable and repeatable process that improved visibility, accelerated development, and delivered measurable return on investment across engineering and customer workflows.

By adopting the Otii Product Suite as a standard tool across teams, Sony’s Altair achieved:

  • A multifold of increase in testing capacity, by enabling engineers to measure power consumption independently without waiting for shared lab equipment
  • Significant reduction in field issues, due to earlier detection of power-related bugs during development
  • Faster time-to-market, driven by shorter validation cycles and reduced bottlenecks
  • Lower equipment cost, by replacing a few high-end power measurement tools with a fleet of compact, and flexible Otii instruments
  • Improved customer alignment, as both Sony’s Altair and its customers used the same measurement tools and shared reliable test data
  • Higher customer satisfaction and retention, through faster support cycles and more transparent optimization efforts

These results were not limited to internal productivity. With KPIs demonstrable through shared, real-world validation data, Sony’s Altair strengthened customer trust and reduced post-release support costs. Power efficiency became a visible and verifiable part of every project, not just a target, but a trackable outcome.

Get started with Otii

If your product is designed to last for years, your power testing workflow must keep pace. Explore the Otii Product Suite and use cases, or talk to us and bring a low-power mindset into your development stack.