From EDN Europe: Step up Bluetooth performance with second-generation silicon

Fabless-chip vendor CSR (Cambridge Silicon Radio) has announced chips in its second-generation Bluetooth product line and has disclosed plans for a forthcoming series of product variants for specific market sectors. CSR builds fully integrated, baseband and RF devices on a CMOS process, and its initial second-generation part offers better specifications in RF parameters and in the memory available to host applications. The new devices have a 1-Mbyte memory-address range—twice that of the previous generation. They also have double the operating range of the previous generation, an increase that the company achieved through an improvement in receiver sensitivity and output power. (The first-generation part did not fully exploit the available power output under the Bluetooth specification.) The new devices also use half the power that the earlier devices used.

CSR calls both the hardware core and the software BlueCore2. The software will become available in a number of variants that will bundle everything you need, including application-level code, to run applications in one package. The first variant, now available for sampling, is the BlueCore2 External, which includes an RF-baseband processor, 32 kbytes of RAM, and host interfaces. You place the protocol stack in an external flash ROM. In forthcoming versions, the program memory will be on-chip in mask ROM or flash memory. The company plans in 2002 to introduce versions with an ARM7 TDMI Thumb coprocessor and an on-chip Kalimba DSP core of CSR's own design. This version will target echo-cancellation applications. A radio-only CDMA-chip version targets incorporation into cell phones to run the Bluetooth stack on the cell phone's baseband processor. A DSP variant supports MP3 decoding and stereo-headphone drives.

CSR will also introduce bundled software for PDA communications, data-link security, and a complete headphone function. The company will support the headphone application and others with the shrink-wrapped BlueLab development system, which supports design changes at the user-interface level to customise the end product.

Cambridge Silicon Radio, +44 1223 692689, www.csr.com.