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| Innovating The Next Big Thing | September 6, 2010 |  |
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Bluetooth’s Bright Future
May 2, 2008 – By Franz Dugand Found as standard on nearly any portable device you can think of, Bluetooth has come of age: It is now the automatic choice for wireless device interoperability. Cost-efficient and robust due to proven Intellectual Property (IP), and gaining significant new capabilities through Ultra-Low Power (ULP) Bluetooth and High Speed Bluetooth (Bluetooth over UWB or Bluetooth over 802.11), Bluetooth’s best years are in fact yet to come, as this article will show. The following section covers the reasons for Bluetooth’s success as short range wireless technology, its applications, the new trends in terms of High Speed Bluetooth and ULP Bluetooth and summarizes with future prospect of Bluetooth as technology.
What Makes Bluetooth a Winner
At first, the history of Bluetooth was a rather stop-start affair. Arriving on the market in 1998, it quickly found its way into higher-end cellphones and computer input devices, but its growth slowed significantly by 2002. Over the last three or four years, however, Bluetooth has approached real ubiquity, helped by its clear design requirements and strong focus on interoperability.
As a mature technology, Bluetooth already has a number of crucial advantages – among them familiarity to consumers, and stability due to established standards and proven Bluetooth IP. These are only a start, however. Because of the huge scales involved, incorporating Bluetooth IP into new chipsets is a viable and cost-effective option, with major performance and reliability benefits. Coupled with major innovations in speed and power-efficiency offered by ULP Bluetooth and High Speed Bluetooth, system-on-chip integration is set to make Bluetooth the key technology for a much wider range of applications, ensuring extremely strong growth over the next decade.
What are the Key Requirements?
Bluetooth was conceived as a way to overcome the spaghetti tangle of wires and connectors that seem to plague electronic devices. Particularly with handheld ones such as PDAs and mobile handsets, this resulted in major user benefits, such ease of movement and inter-device communication. There is now an enormous community of users familiar with pairing devices using Bluetooth, creating a significant barrier to the adoption of other interoperability solutions. For device manufacturers there is often a further benefit, namely device simplification, with no need for jacks, plugs and sockets, and a correspondingly simpler PCB. The ability to use a single chip has also ensured continuous cost decreases.
For both manufacturers and end-users, interoperability and simplicity of use are key. These have been achieved through the specification of profiles for particular applications and the organization of 'UnPlugFests' to ensure interoperability between devices from different manufacturers. The Bluetooth SIG has worked hard to ensure that enhancements are guaranteed to be just as solid as the original; something demonstrated by the delayed ratification of the Bluetooth 2.1+EDR standard in July 2007.
Other key areas for manufacturers are weight, size and power consumption: Bluetooth has always been a low-power protocol, and this is likely is set to improve further, helping Bluetooth's adoption in areas that it currently does not serve. The reason is that Bluetooth IPs are now robust enough to be integrated into system-on-chip (SOC) designs. This includes integration into connectivity chips and application processors for cellphones – offering major cost, weight and power consumption advantages.
Figure 1: Bluetooth Market Size and Growth  Shipment of Bluetooth enabled equipments – IMS Research, 2007
Estimates of Bluetooth’s market size are large and increasing. Currently the market is around 800 million units annually, with some 63% of that being handset-related. Both the handset market and Bluetooth penetration of it are growing, with expectations that by 2011 over 70% of all handsets will be Bluetooth-enabled. However, this is not the only way the market is growing. In 2005 the anticipated market size for 2009 or so was approximately 1 billion units, but during the course of 2006 and 2007 these estimates have been increased dramatically to more than 1.2 billion as Bluetooth finds new applications. There is no doubt that device manufacturers will look to add Bluetooth to more and more devices because of the network benefits of a single short-range connectivity standard.
While Bluetooth is moving further along the path to ubiquity, the market itself is changing. In the first phase, Bluetooth was a separate dedicated chip or chipset. Now we are seeing more and more examples where Bluetooth is integrated with other components in a single chip, such as Bluetooth+GPS+Wifi combo. This trend is likely to continue, because an increasing number of areas where Bluetooth is applicable are large enough to make cost-reduction through integration attractive. That is to say, even if the combination is a niche from a design standpoint, the size of the niche still makes it worthwhile to design specifically for it. However, such integration requires more than just a silicon component.
According to recent forecasts from ABI, there will be over 146 million ICs that combine host processor and Bluetooth. The announcement from Broadcom to make a HSUPA + B T + FM + multimedia single chip is a good example. Several benefits arise from integrating Bluetooth within a host processor. Having one chip instead of two or more will not only reduce the total area and the bill of materials, but will also reduce the production test time and the power consumption of the total solution. Bluetooth is well suited to integration, as implementations now require less than 200 thousand gates for the baseband portion, a tiny amount in today’s multi-million gate ICs. On top of that, resource sharing (e.g. memory and processor) will lead to an even smaller solution and lower cost, as well as lower royalty payments.
Bluetooth IP providers are key enablers for this trend, as the development of a new Bluetooth core and stack to include in a combination chip at this time would not be a wise use of design resources. For a chip company, the advantages of using proven IP instead of developing their own Bluetooth solution from scratch are lower development cost with shortened time to market and lower risk.
In many other technologies, the protocol stack and drivers are comparatively low-level. In contrast, because of its profiles, the Bluetooth software component is extremely large and potentially complex. Furthermore, the interface between the radio and the baseband has not been fully specified. For developers and engineering managers, this implies that the quickest time to market is likely to be a proven integrated solution containing the hardware baseband, the radio and the entire software stack. Chip and subsystem vendors that want to offer Bluetooth combined with something else are likely to be more expert in the “something else” field. Purchasing an integrated solution from a single provider thus reduces the risk of interoperability issues in the Bluetooth portion. Currently, Wipro-Newlogic, ranked number one Bluetooth IP provider by Gartner in its latest semiconductor IP report, is the only company providing a complete Bluetooth offering including baseband, software and radio.
New Flavors of Bluetooth
Bluetooth is developing further in two different directions, the first, known as High Speed Bluetooth, being the higher-bandwidth but lower-power-per-bit Bluetooth over UWB or Bluetooth over 802.11. Even if the BT SIG announced in March 2006 that the UWB technology will be used for the high speed channel, the Bluetooth SIG just unveiled that 802.11 will be given higher priority, UWB being used in a second. High Speed Bluetooth enables a new range of applications such as storage, high-speed file transfer, printing, synchronization, fast music/video download and streaming. At first sight, none of these applications – which are all, in theory, very simple data transfer tasks – requires Bluetooth. They could be handled by other wireless technologies such as WiFi, or Certified Wireless USB (which is also based on UWB). However, as these tasks are quite different to each other, Bluetooth offers an ideal means of combining them in a single, unified and problem-free way. By porting Bluetooth on top of UWB or 802.11, most of the anticipated uses of all the existing Bluetooth profiles are covered. At the same time, Bluetooth provides a framework that allows other uses, such as multimedia, to be created in a non-proprietary fashion, thanks to the definition of new profiles. In addition, Bluetooth handles the security and device registration issues thanks to the Secured Simple Pairing feature added in the newly released Bluetooth 2.1+EDR specifications. Furthermore, the power consumption is more fully optimized in High Speed Bluetooth than in Certified Wireless USB or WiFi, through the use of the legacy Bluetooth part for control signaling and low power modes. Bluetooth therefore allows for a swifter and more reliable implementation than would be possible using other wireless standards.
Initial pilot High Speed Bluetooth implementations can be expected during 2008 and, assuming take up rates similar to previous versions of the Bluetooth standard, widespread adoption in consumer products can be expected in 2010/2011. Because of its large bandwidth, Bluetooth over UWB is likely to be a critical part of future home entertainment and home networking systems. The bandwidth will permit, for example, the driving of high definition video / TV streams from handsets, as well as the ability to support data-intensive jobs such as computer backup and file sharing. For single wireless technology companies, such as Wireless USB chipset vendors and WLAN chipset vendors, High Speed Bluetooth is highly attractive. These vendors may expect to leverage High Speed Bluetooth as a way to enter the huge Bluetooth market by providing higher bandwidth alternatives to traditional Bluetooth applications. Moreover, these vendors are able to concentrate on their core expertise in UWB or WLAN, while integrating third party Bluetooth IP without diverting too many resources
The second direction that Bluetooth development is taking is the extremely low power, low data rate market. “Wibree”, a standard initially developed by Nokia and later adopted by the BT SIG as Ultra Low Power (ULP) Bluetooth, is designed to permit the interoperability of devices such as wireless keyboards, mice, remote controllers, wireless sensors, remote displays and medical devices. In dual-mode implementation devices such as cellphones or laptops, ULP Bluetooth has the benefit that it can reuse most of the existing Bluetooth functionality, incurring only minimal cost increase.
The ULP Bluetooth standard is set to achieve extreme growth in the medical device market and the input device market (mouse, keyboard). Mouse and keyboard profiles already exist in the legacy Bluetooth standard and will then benefit from the optimized power consumption of the ULP Bluetooth version. The newly released Medical Device Profile will create an interoperability backbone that does not yet exist in the medical device market, and the integration of ULP Bluetooth IP into sensor chips will enable reductions in size and power consumption crucial to the sensor and medical device markets.
It All Adds up to Future Success
Bluetooth has a bright future because it benefits from the network effects of ubiquity. Retaining strict interoperability testing requirements means end users can be certain their Bluetooth-enabled devices will be able to communicate with new devices and peripherals. By offering expansion capabilities that leave open the exact choice of expansion options, Bluetooth also provides benefits for manufacturers and OEMs. Bluetooth is an extremely low-cost way of adding expandability, and the use of proven and complete Bluetooth Intellectual Property also reduces risks for designers, who can be confident that their Bluetooth offering will work as intended without unexpected bugs. But Bluetooth does more, and that is why it is likely to spread even further. Because it provides a comprehensive standard that addresses all layers of the protocol stack from the radio to the application, Bluetooth makes it easy to introduce new features and support new applications without consuming a large amount of costly development or testing time. The question in the near future is not going to be whether a device supports Bluetooth, but which profiles and applications it supports over Bluetooth.
Franz Dugand is Bluetooth Product Marketing Manager at Wipro-NewLogic. He may be reached by e-mail at: franz.dugand@wipro.com.
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