Altair renamed as Sony Semiconductor Israel after being acquired four years ago

Its IoT product line will continue to hold the Altair brand, however.

Altair Semiconductor has been renamed as Sony Semiconductor Israel, the company announced on Wednesday.

It comes four years after the Israeli semiconductor company, founded by former Texas Instruments executives, was acquired for $212 million by the Japanese tech giant.

“We have been honoured to be part of Sony for the past four years, playing a key role in the company’s core business,” Sony Semiconductor Israel CEO Nohik Semel said in a statement.

“To better reflect our long-term commitment to our partners and customers, as well as the quality of our offering, we have decided to change Altair’s company name to Sony.”

“We expect to see great innovations in the field of IoT and sensing as we continue to make it easier for machines to talk to each other and to build AI capabilities directly into our semiconductors and solutions,” Sony Semiconductor CEO Terushi Shimizu added.

The company said, however, its Internet of Things (IoT) product line would continue to use the Altair branding. 

Sony Semiconductor Israel previously touted its cellular IoT chipsets as being cost-effective and power-efficient. The chipsets are used to support LTE-M and NB-IoT networks.

In the IoT space, the company has worked with companies such as Arm, Giesecke+Devrien, Here Technologies, Murata, and Siera Wireless to provide modules for IoT applications such as trackers, smart meters, smart labels, wearable devices, and vehicle telematics. The company’s chipsets are also used in the 4G LTE networks of telcos such as AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, and KDDI.

It has also developed an artificial intelligence digital signal processor that was included in Sony’s IMX500 and IMX501 intelligent vision sensors that were announced in May. Sony at the time touted these as the “world’s first” image sensors that also have built-in AI processing.