Bluetooth projected to emerge in force next year

Bluetooth projected to emerge in force next year
By Stephan Ohr, EE Times
December 17, 2001 (11:54 a.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20011214S0076

SAN FRANCISCO — Although attendance at the annual Bluetooth Developers Conference was down, exhibiting manufacturers here were all on the same page: Consumer products embodying the wireless cable-replacement technology will be available in the first half. Some 6 million to 7 million Bluetooth transceiver ICs have shipped to system developers this year. That's mere preparation for the product onslaught that is about to hit the United States, say Bluetooth principals.

Microsoft Corp. gave the technology a further boost this past week — barely a year after claiming that Bluetooth was not ready for use in its operating systems — when it announced plans to offer native support for the standard in future versions of Windows XP.

But the pending Bluetooth products will be considerably less ambitious than the ad hoc networking devices once seen as Bluetooth's venue. That function h as been usurped by access points and PC cards implementing the IEEE-802.11b network. Instead, next year's Bluetooth will be embedded in cellular handsets and accessories for handsets.

Ericsson's T39m, T68 and R520m Bluetooth-enabled phones are available now, said Johan Kesson, strategic-marketing manager for Bluetooth at Ericsson (Lund, Sweden).

Nokia's Bluetooth-enabled 6310 phone, already shipping in Europe, will be available in the United States in 2002, said Frank Vium, the company's application business-development manager.

3Com Corp. (West Valley City, Utah) demonstrated PC-card attachment devices that allow Bluetooth-enabled cell phones to serve as analog modems to connect with the Internet and receive e-mail. The PC cards use a retractable antenna module, said Kurt Olsen, marketing manager for 3Com's mobile and wireless business. The products are available now, he said.

But it may be well into 2003 before such products are available at consumer electronics retailers, said Cahners In -Stat Group analyst Morry Marshall, who chaired the Coexistence, Competition and Market Confusion panel here.

Panelist Frank Hanzlik, chief technology officer of Mobilian Corp. (Hillsboro, Ore.), said future portable computers and handheld devices will carry multiple wireless transceivers. Application software will automatically detect the wireless options and pick the one that works.

And Pratik Mehta, senior LAN and Bluetooth technologist at Dell Computer Corp., acknowledged that his company is looking to put Bluetooth and 802.11b wireless-LAN technology on the same PC card.

Coffee bar connection

But much of the functionality once seen as Bluetooth's domain — such as the ability to log on to the Internet from a Starbucks coffee bar — decidedly favors 802.11, for which the implementation infrastructure is already in place. Bluetooth, in contrast, would be reserved for short-distance wireless connects, particularly those applications requiring low power, low cost and a s mall form factor.

Rather than ad hoc networks, the first available Bluetooth products will be point-to-point cable replacements between headset and cell phone, cell phone and computer, and computer and nearby peripherals, conference goers said.

Still, Lung Yeh, president and chief executive officer of Pico Communications (Cupertino, Calif.), demonstrated a wireless access point.

And Jan Johanson, chairman of Anoto (Lund, Sweden), showed a Bluetooth pen-and-paper combination that transmits handwritten notes and drawings between a paper notebook and a Bluetooth-enabled computer.

The Bluetooth industry has become more conservative in its estimates, but if up to 7 million transceivers shipped this year, it's possible that 48 million units will ship next year. In-Stat's Marshall believes that one day, each person will likely carry multiple Bluetooth devices, meaning 500 million to 750 million units could ship in 2005.

As many as 64 percent of the Bluetooth chips that went out in 2001 were s upplied by Cambridge Silicon Radio, according to that company's marketing vice president, Eric Jansen. Companies like Microsoft and application developer Widcomm Inc. (San Diego) are using products from CSR (Cambridge, England) and from Silicon Wave (San Diego) to help qualify their own products.

The foundering Bluetooth 2.0 spec, designed to increase data rates to 12 Mbits/second, is over-hyped, said CSR's Jansen. The real goal is to get products embodying the 1.1 spec into production. Jansen believes embedding Bluetooth will be the key to acceptance: If you embed Bluetooth in a widely used device like a cell phone or computer, people will "accessorize" around it. "There's going to be a flood of Bluetooth devices hitting the market in May and June," he claimed.

Texas Instruments Inc. has shipped 1.5 million Bluetooth chip sets based on its BSN6020 point-to-point baseband processor and TRF6001 BiCMOS transceiver in 2001, said Bryce Johnstone, TI's marketing manager for short-distance wireless produc ts. New baseband processors (particularly the ROM-based point-to-multipoint BSN6050) will provide options but won't ship until September 2002. Ultimately, single-chip integration will shrink the cost of the $5 to $8 chip set to $1.50, the company said.

"People don't want to pay $80 for a Bluetooth headset," Johnstone said. Only 5 percent of users paid more than $150 for their handset in 2001, and only 7 percent expect to pay that much for their next handset next year, he said, citing data from Strategy Analytics.

Lowering the size and cost of Bluetooth is also on the mind of Lars Nord, Ericsson Components' technical manager for RF modules. Ericsson's latest radio, the ERC41, integrates a variety of on-chip components, including an antenna switch, baluns and passives. The die is only one-third the cost of the transceiver, Nord said, and the only passives required are external dc decoupling capacitors. The object is to lower the cost, but the removal of analog components enables systems integrators "t o treat it more like a digital part," said Nord.

The price is half that of the previous module, and the component fits in standard plastic packages. The device runs from a 2.8-volt supply, consumes 27 milliamps at full tilt and requires only 11 external components. Ericsson believes in separating the radio and baseband portions of the Bluetooth design, although integration is intended to reduce dependencies like crosstalk. The device will be fabricated in an 0.18-micron CMOS process, but production quantities won't appear until midyear 2002.

"It takes a little longer than we like to think," Mobilian's Hanzlik told the coexistence panel, "but the revolution is just around the corner."