NEW YORK-Dallas-based Texas Instruments has begun making samples of its new Bluetooth chipset available and will begin shipping them by year-end, Christian Dupont, general manager of the short-distance wireless unit, said.
Developed by Butterfly VLSI Ltd., an Israeli company TI acquired early last year, the offering comprises: a 0.18 Micron Bluetooth baseband based on Read Only Memory; a fully integrated Bluetooth software stack; and a bipolar Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor radio-frequency transceiver that is branded the BiCMOS.
Butterfly’s implementation of the software is sufficiently advanced that it can be “frozen and put into the ROM,” Dupont said.
“Putting it into Read Only Memory means you lose some flexibility to change it, so the software needs to be mature when you do this.”
Embedding the software into the ROM confers a significant advantage in that the TI Bluetooth chipset can deliver full-bandwidth, one Megabit per second of performance without the need for external Flash memory.
“We are shaving off a significant cost and removing the need for a big extra package (the flash memory),” Dupont said.
The ensemble measures five square millimeters, compared with the eight millimeters square size required with external Flash memory, he added.
In its Bluetooth chip configuration, Texas Instruments opted to keep the analog RF functions and the digital baseband functions separate.
“You must keep the baseband piece purely digital to optimize the system. Selecting this type of partitioning opens up an interesting migration for Bluetooth, ultimately to a one-chip solution, because cell phones are centered around DSPs (digital signal processors), and you will see digital cameras, Internet audio and PDAs (personal digital assistants) centered around DSPs,” Dupont said.
At the same time, Texas Instruments has promised its original equipment manufacturer customers that all versions of its Bluetooth chipset will be backward and forward compatible, he said.
