The essence of being a successful small challenger in the chip industry is to identify trends before they happen and take a position, rather than like spotting an obscure stock and investing early. Selecting markets which will deliver growth, but will be ignored ‘ at least for a while ‘ by the more mainstream players is a high risk activity, and relies on understanding industry politics as much as technologies. Israel’s Altair Semiconductor is a good example of a wireless challenger, looking for the niches which will enable it to be disruptive against the baseband giants like Qualcomm, Intel and so on. Its current big bet is on single-mode LTE, initially for the fixed access space, and then for the…