Orca shows a full dual-mode Bluetooth core in CMOS

By _EDN Practical Chip Design

August 8, 2011

The market trajectory of Bluetooth shows the value of perseverance. From a premature launch resulting in something remarkably similar to abject failure, Bluetooth became the unquestioned standard for people who wanted to wear a low-gain microwave oven next to their skulls, recharge the thing every night, and say “sorry, what was that?” a lot. From such humble success the standard has gone on to become a quite plausible $75 replacement for a meter of six-conductor cable. And with the addition of the Extended Data Rate (EDR) and Low-Energy modes, Bluetooth could become, almost by default, a major factor in all sorts of near-field communications, including the machine-to-machine kind.

As Bluetooth spreads into applications requiring significant levels of integration, it begins to present a problem for SoC designers. A Bluetooth transceiver is a relatively sophisticated 2.4 GHz spread-spectrum radio: not the sort of thing you license at RTL and hand off to a subcontractor to synthesize and integrate. In fact, there are only a few complete Bluetooth radio cores on the market. Most of the IP out there is in the form of building-blocks, intended for design teams who know their way around the inside of a digital radio.

This situation makes an announcement by IP developer Orca Systems this week quite intriguing.

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