Burst mode
The Bluetooth inundation
Paul G Schreier, Contributing Editor

For the past year we've been hearing about the imminent wonders of Bluetooth, the scheme that allows instant, automatic connections between wireless devices in close proximity (see the sidebar, "Refresher course"). But then one delay after another held back products. It was beginning to sound like another of those world-altering technologies that existed only in the minds of marketeers—one that might never come to fruition.

My, how things have changed in just the past few months.

The Bluetooth SIG (Special Interest Group) has nailed down the specification, to the point where vendors can manufacture prototypes that stand a good chance of working together. The SIG has hosted "Unplug Fests," which help vendors spot interoperability problems before product shippments begin. And silicon houses are starting to manufacture Bluetooth chips in the volumes necessary to get this industry off the starting line.

In fact, the first few Bluetooth products are now trickling out. And by most accounts, you'll soon come to think of Bluetooth as a standard feature of most convergence devices—much in the way we expect a USB port on almost any PC, music player, or camera. With single-chip Bluetooth implementations soon to reach the $5 level, there's little to stop manufacturers from adding this capability.

The battle is joined

If you prefer military analogies, Skip Bryan, director of technology development at Ericsson, likens the situation to preparations for a war. In the first phase of Bluetooth design, the industry drew the battle lines. Interoperability tests represent skirmishes where competitors tested the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches. Since then, vendors have been regrouping, gathering ammunition, and loading their guns. Now they're starting to take the first shots in the real battle.

If you need convincing that products are actually appearing, check out the site of the Bluetooth Qualification Program (qualweb.opengroup.org). Vendors can't sell products as "Bluetooth certified" without going through this process. The total of certified products increases daily, and as of this writing the number exceeds 100, among them a number of Bluetooth chips.

Chips ahoy

Indeed, one thing that has held up the introduction of Bluetooth products into the consumer market has been the supply of chips, explains Ericsson's Bryan. The industry was testing new concepts, exercising the necessary caution. "You don't make millions of chips with the knowledge you might have to come back and do it all over again," Bryan says. "We got a first spec in the summer of 1999, and finalized it to V1.0b at the end of that year. We also have the experience of several Unplug Fests, where vendors bring their products in for interoperability verification. Since then, we've developed critical errata, and V1.1 of the spec should be ratified very soon." In fact, the spec should be approved by the time this article appears. In other words, Bryan concludes, it's safe for everyone to start manufacturing chips in volume.

While multiple companies are supplying Bluetooth modules, what the industry really wants is a single-chip Bluetooth implementation, which would be cost- and size-effective for portable consumer devices. The Bluetooth SIG has voiced the opinion that a $5 chip would spur the market, and it appears we're going to reach that goal much more quickly than almost everyone would have predicted just last year.

Consider a few statistics from one of the leading suppliers, Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR). The firm claims to have shipped 300,000 of its BlueCore 01 chips, as well as 500 development systems. The chip, which sells for $8.20 in OEM quantities, incorporates not only the baseband and RF sections and a microcontroller, but also a USB interface, an audio PCM (pulse code modulation) interface, and an external memory driver. OEMs must add an antenna, a crystal, a few passive components, and several circuit-board traces.

While CSR touts itself as a supplier of single-chip devices, some competitors dispute that claim. They correctly point out that the chip needs not only an external crystal (as do almost all Bluetooth chips), but also external memory. CSR counters by saying that it makes no sense to burn software into internal memory when the spec isn't yet nailed down. Once the V1.1 spec is ratified, CSR intends to start finalizing BlueCore 02, which will have onboard memory; samples are planned for August with production in December.

When customers judge that the software becomes stable enough to go to a cost-effective masked ROM, the device should reach the $5 point. The 01 model employs a proprietary 16-bit RISC processor and leaves 4 or 5 MIPS (millions of instructions per second) free for user tasks. With the 02 chip, CSR plans to switch to the well-known ARM processor, making it easier for developers to write programs that use those extra MIPS. A couple of months later, you can look for the 03, which will add application-specific features, starting with an audio codec and flash memory.

All the major chip vendors are planning on getting into the Bluetooth game. "I count more than 40 firms with Bluetooth solutions," says Michael Wall, a Frost & Sullivan wireless research analyst who recently authored a Bluetooth market report. "But I take only about 20 of them seriously and view the others as just jumping on the bandwagon. And of those serious entries, I'd optimistically say that only about 10 can actually supply silicon today."

Roll your own

Not surprisingly, some large consumers of Bluetooth chips, such as equipment suppliers, like the idea of having their own source. One example is Alcatel with its Microelectronics Division. In September 1999, the firm started development of a single-chip Bluetooth implementation, and last November it started showing prototypes. The company is now ready to roll the device out to the market. The MTC 60110 comes in a ceramic package with built-in memory and an antenna; it requires only an external crystal. Alcatel also says that, unlike many competitive products, this chip provides a full implementation of the V1.0b and V1.1 specs.

Initial prices for this first-generation device should fall into the $12 to $15 range in OEM quantities. However, Alcatel intends to drive prices down by creating derivative products that target specific volume applications by eliminating unneeded functions. Leading off this second wave, with prototypes scheduled for September, is a client-only USB dongle. By the end of the year, look for an audio device that adds an audio amp, a codec, and echo-cancellation functions. The third wave, Alcatel predicts, will come in 2003, when Bluetooth functions start getting integrated into other baseband chips. For example, a GSM phone already has a baseband section and needs only the Bluetooth RF circuitry.

UNBOUND: GN Netcom’s GN 9000 was the first commercially available headset to achieve official Bluetooth certification. The $499 system comes with a desktop base station, which plugs into any phone, and a lightweight headset.

Consumer arrivals

Although it doesn't yet manufacture its own chips (a chip set should launch within the next few months), Motorola is a leading-edge developer of systems through its Digianswer division. In fact, Motorola provides all its products to other firms under private-label agreements.

Motorola claims that its PC Card was the first certified Bluetooth system to actually ship. Other products in the pipeline include a USB dongle, which should be available by the time this article appears, as well as a clip-on attachment that makes Motorola's Timeport 270C cell phone into a Bluetooth-enabled device.

One reseller of Motorola's products is Toshiba, which put its $199 PC Card on the market last September. With this card and the bundled Spanworks application, users can have all the notebook PC systems in a room display the same PowerPoint presentation, chat, transfer files, and exchange virtual business cards.

Michael Wall

Talk to me...

With systems actually starting to ship, end users are becoming concerned with several issues that until now they're only read about, chief among them interoperability and interference. Information from manufacturers and market researchers seems to indicate that excess worrying is unwarranted.

You can never expect true 100 percent interoperability among every possible type of device, says Frost & Sullivan's Wall. To be realistic, there are too many types of applications, each with different system requirements. For example, a headset profile isn't designed to exchange data with a PDA. Eric Janson, CSR's vice president of applications and engineering, concedes that with initial hardware and software many interoperability problems did arise. However, when the public rollout occurs, a few isolated problems will likely remain here and there, but for the most part the systems will work together.

Recognizing the vital importance of interoperability to Bluetooth's market acceptance and eventual success, the SIG organizes Unplug Fests on a continual basis. Firms rent suites in hotels and sign up to test their systems' abilities to work with others. These tests are conducted under strict nondisclosure and supposedly with only engineering staff present—not marketing people. Thus the meetings aim to provide a safe, open environment where SIG members can evaluate their products and discuss possible solutions.

...but don't interrupt

Clearly you want Bluetooth devices talking to each other, but you don't want them sending "signals" to other services in the same portion of the spectrum. However, many products and services operate legally in the ISM (industrial scientific medical) band, where unlicensed low-power systems are authorized by the FCC (and similar agencies internationally). Of considerable concern are wireless LANs that operate according to the IEEE 802.11b specification. Both 802.11b and Bluetooth operate in the 2.4-GHz band, although they use somewhat different spread-spectrum radio techniques. It's not possible to have both types in the same physical location without the chance of some interference.

Responding to this fact, the industry has set up the 802.15.2 Task Force, a group organized under the auspices of the IEEE to investigate Bluetooth/802.11b coexistence issues, such as the amount of interference and possible ways to minimize it. Little authoritative data on coexistence has been publicly available until recently, but TI just released its findings on the topic. Matthew B Shoemake, manager of R&D for TI's Wireless Networking Business Unit, authored the study. Full results are available online (www.ti.com/sc/wirelessnetworking), but here's an executive summary. When Bluetooth and 802.11 systems are immediately adjacent to each other, they can have a significantly detrimental effect on each other's throughput. However, it doesn't take much physical separation before this degradation drops off considerably. For instance, with an 802.11b net operating in the same room, Bluetooth throughput reaches approximately 90 percent of its baseline value.

The 802.15.2 Task Group is looking at various technical solutions, some of which will require input from the FCC. For instance, TI and other companies have petitioned the FCC to change the regulations governing frequency hopping to allow intelligent schemes that could better accommodate nearby systems.

What the future holds

By now you should be convinced that the Bluetooth pot is going from a simmer to a boil. Projections from market researchers reflect this activity, and numbers that once seemed impossibly optimistic now seem plausible if not realistic. For instance, Frost & Sullivan's Wall predicts that shipments for this year will include 51 million Bluetooth chipsets with a value of $413 million. Considerably more conservative is Semico Research, which sees a Bluetooth chip market of 8 million units with a value of $65 million this year. Given this large base, it's not hard to see why research numbers that look five years or more into the future soar rapidly into the stratosphere.

As for how the market will develop, Joyce Putscher, director of consumer and converging markets and technologies with market research firm Cahners In-Stat, envisions a three-stage scenario. In the first wave of products, starting now and extending until about the end of next year, PC Cards plus adapters/dongles should account for the bulk of the business. In this wave, you can also look for Bluetooth in high-end mobile phones, notebook PCs, access points, headsets, and desktop PCs. The cost of adding Bluetooth to a device starts near $20, but drops over time to near $5.

This same price point will help kick off the second wave, which will run for roughly two years starting at the end of 2002. This wave will add mid-range mobile phones, handheld PCs, cordless phones, home-networking equipment, auto products, and industrial and vertical applications.

Overlapping the end of the second wave and benefiting from further price drops, the third wave will then add lower-end mobile phones and portable computing devices, Internet appliances, set-top boxes, and other consumer devices.

In 2005, In-Stat predicts, 1.4 billion Bluetooth enabled products will ship, with the largest markets being digital mobile phones (74 percent), computing and peripheral products (14 percent), and accessories like PC Cards, adapters, and headsets (8 percent).

Everyone agrees that mobile phones will be a logical market for Bluetooth, but not everyone agrees on the exact path. Here, iSuppli predicts that most early products will be snap-on modules that connect to current handsets or modules and go inside an accessory battery pack. The company expects only a couple-percent penetration into the current 2G digital cell-phone market for basic applications such as wireless headsets. Instead, the major adoption of Bluetooth will take place in 2.5G and 3G handsets that have data communications as a key part of their makeup. In this segment, the firm expects penetration to start at 7 percent this year and reach 80 percent by 2004.

Thus it's interesting to hear that Ericsson is getting ready to release the R520M, which integrates Bluetooth within the phone's RF electronics. The launch is expected in the next month or so, with broad availability slated for the second half of this year.

Where else we'll see Bluetooth appear is up for grabs, and it should be fascinating to see which new products and markets develop. To cite just one example, Ericsson is developing the Cordless Web Screen, a Web tablet with a speakerphone, email, calendar, and contact database on a 7-inch color touchscreen. Look for it later this year.

Author information

Contributing Editor Paul G Schreier is a technical writer in Rye, NH. He hopes that his article on Bluetooth last year (“Spontaneous connections,”) didn’t feed the hype that made this article’s opening paragraphs necessary.