December 1, 2000

The force
Support makes Bluetooth look unstoppable

Despite technical and financial obstacles I’ve previously described (see “Great expectations”), Bluetooth momentum continues to build like an unstoppable force. On the enabler side,

Atmel and Silicon Wave have partnered to develop a reference design for a Bluetooth PC Card. The design combines an Atmel baseband processor

and a Silicon Wave radio modem. At Comdex, meanwhile, National Semiconductor demonstrated connection of several of its WebPADs using USB-based Bluetooth dongles that incorporate a National baseband processor and RF modem. Toshiba and Qualcomm showed a link between a cell phone and a notebook PC, and Ensure Technologies and IBM demonstrated a security application in which a Bluetooth module must be near a notebook in order for the computer to function. Impressive, but show me an application with service discovery (see “Joined effort”).

—Maury Wright