An IC supporting several wireless standards is the way forward for the telecoms industry, as device manufacturers demand more options and the technologies are used together to improve performance.
“Device manufacturers are asking for converged devices. Handset devices are becoming antenna farms with seven to eight antennas, so we’re driving our suppliers to integrate as much as possible,” said Fred Zimbric, manager of emerging technologies at Motorola.
CSR believes Bluetooth offers connection for a wide variety of applications beyond the mono headset it is mostly associated with, but the Cambridge-based company is looking at integrating other technologies on the same chip.
“With one [Bluetooth] chip and one antenna we can provide multiple applications and extend into more application areas,” said Robin Heydon, technical consultant at CSR. “But we can successfully integrate these other technologies -
Wibree now, UWB next - and use each radio when need to use them. With a single protocol stack we can optimise the radio for each application.”
Which technology would be appropriate to use in each instance would be determined by the chip rather than the user, according to Heydon.
“Customers want to incorporate all the different standards but don’t want different chips. All on one is what the customers want,” said Heydon. “But it’s a difficult job to integrate different radios on one piece of silicon.”
Anders Edlund, marketing director,
Bluetooth Special Interest Group, believes combining technologies is the way forward.
“We’re working with the
WiMedia Alliance to make the best of two technologies for personal area networking,” said Edlund.
“The beauty of Bluetooth is it can be used to set up and maintain a link and then WiMedia [UWB] can be used to transmit the information data.”