Oki plans CMOS single-chip Bluetooth solution

Oki plans CMOS single-chip Bluetooth solution
By Yoshiko Hara, EE Times
June 23, 2000 (12:46 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20000623S0019

TOKYO ( ChipWire) -- Oki Electric Industry Co. Ltd. has developed a full CMOS Bluetooth chip set and intends to offer it as part of a total Bluetooth solution this July with development tools and software co-developed with Widcomm Inc. in San Diego. Volume production of the chip set will begin early next year.

The chip set consists of a CMOS RF transceiver and a baseband controller. "The RF LSI realizes 2.4-GHz high-frequency communication capability with a full CMOS process," said Masayoshi Ino, managing director of Oki Electric Industry. The CMOS RF transceiver will make it relatively easy to create a single-chip solution that integrates the digital baseband chip, he said.

The RF transceiver comes in a 48-pin BGA that measures 7 square millimeters. The baseband chip, packaged in a 144-pin BGA measuring 11 mm square, has a 32-bit ARM RISC processor as a core and a PCM-CVSD (contin uous variable slope delta modulation) transcoder for voice communications. It also includes a UART as well as USB, PCM and JTAG interfaces.

On the software side, Oki has licensed protocol stacks from Widcomm and combined them with its internally-developed wireless communication control software. The capabilities of the software package ranges from a basic level of support for a host control interface to the application level.

Oki plans for its sales of Bluetooth products to reach about $100 million in the fiscal 2002.