Track 5

BLUETOOTH SOLUTIONS

Just what do you need to know about Bluetooth solutions? What you need when developing applications? Find out from several case studies and get an overview of different development kits, new applications, and look at various aspects of Bluetooth security.

Synchronization Module

This module will address the issues in synchronization between PCs, PDAs and other mobile devices.

• PC and PDA
• Implementing Synchronization Handsets

By Stephan Ohr

SAN JOSE, CALIF. — Cypress Semiconductor Corp. announced last week it will acquire Alation Systems Inc., a privately held wireless systems company based in Mountain View, Calif.

Alation maintains a portfolio of analog, DSP and RF baseband intellectual property (IP). The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

The purchase of Alation — combined with the earlier acquisition of RadioCom Corp. — brings together the intellectual properties required to implement a $7 Bluetooth solution, said Cathal Phelan, vice president of the newly formed Interface Products Division. The IP includes RF transceivers, baseband processors and firmware.

A number of manufacturers are exploring direct-conversion architectures as a means of eliminating the passive components ordinarily associated with 2.45-GHz RF transceivers. Some observers believe, however, that the CMOS fabrication technology will need two more generational shrinks before direct conversion becomes practical for handheld radios. Phelan declined to discuss the architecture of the Bluetooth radio under consideration at Cypress, except to say it would be fabricated in 0.25-micron BiCMOS—which ideally would eliminate many of the passive components.

“You can have multiple heterodynes,” said Dan MeCranie, Cypress executive vice president, sales and marketing. He disagrees with critics who say that a $7 Bluetooth solution is not likely in the next few years. “They said USB for under a $1 was impossible—now look where we are, McCranie said.

Cypress has already penetrated the cellular telephony market with low-power SRAMs, he said. With over 100 million units shipped in that industry, Cypress SRAMs may be in as many as one-fourth of all cellular handsets, he estimated. Products developed by the Interface Products Division may be able to further penetrate that market.

In addition to Bluetooth, Cypress hopes to develop products for IEEE802.11 and HomeRF wireless local-area networks.

Alation in fact is author of the HomeCast Open Protocol for wireless LANs. Licensees of the protocol had included National Semiconductor.

Electronic Engineering Times May 8, 2000

http://www.eet.com/

Showing a strong and unified front, every major player involved in the Bluetooth special interest group (SIG), the prime motivating force behind this new wireless protocol, attended the Bluetooth Developer’s Conference late last year in Los Angeles. Exhibitors included representatives from the founding SIG companies Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Nokia and Toshiba, which were there to show hardware and software designed to take advantage of the potential of Bluetooth-based communications.

However, tempered optimism prevailed. Attendees were hopeful because Bluetooth modules are expected to be included this year in several mobile devices ranging from handheld computers and PDAs to cell phones and pagers; tempered because the technology still faces many development obstacles and because the industry is operating under the specter of infrared (IrDA), a communications technology that was widely adopted by the industry but failed to find a functional home among end users.

Nevertheless, analysts agree that the future is bright for Bluetooth. Oddly named after a Danish king who ruled a thousand years ago, Bluetooth is a short-range wireless local area network operating on the 2.4GHz frequency that facilitates communications between enabled devices within 35 feet of each other. Bluetooth uses radio technology to transmit voice and data, thus eliminating cables. Unlike infrared, line- of-sight requirements do not limit Bluetooth, and at up to 2MB per second, the data-transmission rate is much greater. With this technology, a single device can connect with up to 200 others and automatically share information.

In fact, Bluetooth users literally can synchronize all of their enabled devices simply by entering a room. Furthermore, existing applications that are designed to run over a cable or wired connection today are expected to be able to operate via a Bluetooth connection in the near future without modifications to the application or the operating system. Taken to its logical conclusion, a Bluerooth world might enable a mobile phone to connect with an untethered headset and later synchronize address-book entries between the phone, a handheld computer and a notebook. We even foresee a time when Bluetooth-enabled pay phones might enable you to connect a notebook to the Internet without wires.

According to a 1999 study by Cahners In-Stat Group, a market-research firm based in Scottsdale, AZ, the number of Bluetooth chips could go from essentially zero today to 260 million units in four years and Bluetooth-enabled products should exceed 200 million units sold. “The markets for Bluetooth that will take off in the first wave will primarily be high-end cellular and PCS handsets and notebook PCs that are geared toward the corporate market or business user, primarily due to cost issues,” says Joyce Putscher, director for Cahners In-Stat Group’s consumer and convergence markets.

But analysts also agree that there are several pitfalls that could derail Bluetooth or, at the very least, slow its adoption. Some of these obstacles include interoperability between hardware and software and disputes among vendors and developers.

“I believe that the industry needs to stop the infighting and get on with the business at hand — connectivity in applications,” believes Andrew Seybold, editor in chief of the Seybold Group. “If all of the camps think that somebody has to win, then everybody is going to lose. My requirement for success: Make sure all of it works out of the box."

Surprisingly the technology’s advantages could prove to be its undoing. The Bluetooth specification has it operating on the 2.4GHz band, which is impressively effective in the transmission of voice and data. But some ambitious developers hope to take the technology to the next level by raising the frequency to 5.8GHz, which would facilitate the transmission of video across wireless devices. “Some of the players involved are looking forward to a 5.8GHz band for Bluetooth, although not right away but they are looking at it,” Cahners’ Putscher says.

“One of the things that really scares me about Bluetooth is to have an industry full-charge-ahead at 2.4GHz and then all of a sudden, a year or two from now, change gears and say ‘Let’s go to 5.8GHz’ “ Seybold adds. “We need to keep Bluetooth at 2.4GHz, get it ubiquitous, get it built-in and then next-generation — not six months from now or 18 months from now. Five years from now maybe, take a look at moving it. It’s OK to talk about futures. But don’t pull a John Sculley and stand up with a Newton in your hand and promise everything to everybody” — William P. Flanagan

MOBILE COMPUTING & COMMUNICATIONS MAY 2000  http://www.mobilecomputing.com/

Research and
Development in Berlin

Looking towards a wireless future
Cordless communication with wireless engines

We are a young international team developing products for the wireless communication of data with the aid of state-of-the-art technologies:

GSM • UMTS • Bluetooth • DECT

We are situated in Berlin If you are interested in working abroad for a few years and getting to know the expanding metropolis of Berlin, it will be worth your while getting in touch with us.

We are looking for professionals in the fields of:

• Digital Hardware
• Radio Frequency
• Software
• System Test

We are also on the lookout for engineers with experience as team leaders or prolect managers.

Get in touch with us at:

www.job4u-siemens.de
e-mail [email protected] Telefon: +49 (30) 386 29824

Post:

Siemens AG, Mrs. Brigitte Raasé, Siemensdamm 50, D-1 3629 Berlin Information and Communications

By Nair Chendakera

BANGALORE, INDIA — A Windows driver developed by Impulse Software and based on the Bluetooth wireless communications standard has already attracted international customers, the Indian company said.

Impulse Software, a startup based here, said its BlueUSB product is being shipped to several customers, including a large German telecommunications company and a Japanese computer manufacturer. It declined to identify the customers. Impulse’s BlueUSB product is based on version 1.0a of the Bluetooth wireless standard and target Microsoft Corp.’s Windows environment for PCs. Baskar Subramanian Impulse’s chief executive officer, said the company believes the product is the first one of its kind to become commercially available. I

Impulse Software, which was founded by design engineers who previously worked with Texas Instruments Inc. and National Semiconductor Corp. in India, also provides consulting, system integration services and training for developing Bluetooth applications and products using its BlueUSB driver.

BlueUSB is an implementation of the software layers of the Bluetooth standard and operates as a Windows DM driver that allows for network

access and serial port emulation for applications based on the Bluetooth wireless medium. The software driver interacts with the lower Bluetooth stack over the Universal Serial Bus (USB).

BlueUSB, which includes the HCI, L2CAP, SDP, and RF-COMM stack, is available for Windows 2000, Windows 98 and Windows NT platforms. It also supports data applications. Impulse said the product complies with the General Access Profile, Service Discovery Application and Serial Port Profile.

The Bluetooth driver also complies with dial-up networking, fax and LAN access profiles. It includes a USB miniport driver interface with the Microsoft USB class driver and supports an NDIS interface for Bluetooth device access by network applications. BlueUSB handles communications port emulation to provide Bluetooth device access to legacy serial port applications as well.

Route to PC

Subramanian predicted BlueUSB would hasten the adoption of the Bluetooth standard in PCs. “It will make the adoption of Bluetooth functionality for a developer as easy as integrating any standard PC peripheral,” he said. “That would provide PC users with transparent access to Bluetooth technology through standard Windows applications and utilities.”

The Windows interface also makes it easier for users to integrate the Bluetooth application with their own products, said S. Srividhya, director of Bluetooth development for Impulse.

“Impulse has released a Bluetooth API for developing Bluetooth native applications over BlueUSB,” he added. “Cellular phone, PDA and PC manufacturers can design-in Bluetooth connectivity quickly for their products to achieve time-to- market needs in early 2000.”

The Bluetooth standard, designed to allow portable electronic devices such as handheld PCs to communicate over a short-haul, 1-Mbit/s network, has so far registered mixed results. Compatibility issues contributed to delays by chip makers who had hoped to introduce their first products based on the Bluetooth spec late last year.

Impulse’s design is built on top of its iBTStack. In this configuration, BlueUSB acts as a radio peripheral software driver accessible through the standard control panel application. The iBTStack is a portable implementation of the Bluetooth protocol software stack, specifically aimed at embedded platforms.

Production versions of Impulse's Bluetooth diver expected in the second quarter.

EE Times February 29, 2000 page 36

By Craig Matsumoto

SAN JOSE, CALIF. — A company that contributed to the Palm III’s infrared “beaming” capability has been enlisted to bring Bluetooth wireless networking to the Palm as well.

Extended Systems Inc. (Boise, Idaho) will provide 3Com Corp. with a Bluetooth software stack for the Palm OS, the companies announced at the Wireless Symposium here last week.

Extended is best known for working with infrared-based connectivity, but the company sees Bluetooth as a ripe area for expansion, said Nathan Pendleton, manager of Extended’s mobile solutions business unit.

“The technologies are different, but they’re solving the same problem,” he said. In addition, the Infrared Data Association (IrDA) and Bluetooth protocol stacks share some common elements, such as the Object Exchange (Obex) file transfer protocol.

In the 3Com deal, Extended will port a Bluetooth protocol stack to the Palm OS from its XTNDAccess Blue software development kit, which is designed to add Bluetooth capabilities to a variety of devices and operating systems.

Founded by veterans of Hewlett-Packard Co., Extended develops hardware and software aimed at IrDA connectivity, more for mobile computing than for the desktop PC. Products have included infrared-connectivity docking stations and data-synchronization software.

After the acquisition of software specialist Counterpoint Systems Foundry Inc. (Corvallis, Ore.), the company was chosen to do an IrDA-compliant beaming feature for the then-upcoming Palm III. It was Counterpoint’s IrDA protocol stack that was eventually added to the Palm III.

The success of that feature helped Extended nab the Bluetooth project for Palm. “They started to look at what else to do, and Bluetooth was on the horizon,” Pendleton said. “They looked at us—they knew us, and they knew we were doing Bluetooth.”

Extended officials began investigating Bluetooth early on and concluded that it could coexist with infrared connectivity. ‘While Bluetooth’s 10-meter range exceeds infrared’s, it’s less adept at making the kinds of ad hoc connections such as Palm III beaming, Pendleton to Palm platform was Counterpoint’s IrDA protocol stack that was eventually added to the Palm III.

The success of that feature helped Extended nab the Bluetooth project for Palm. “They started to look at what else to do, and Bluetooth was on the horizon,” Pendleton said. “They looked at us—they knew us, and they knew we were doing Bluetooth.”

Extended officials began investigating Bluetooth early on and concluded that it could coexist with infrared connectivity. While Bluetooth’s 10-meter range exceeds infrared’s, it’s less adept at making the kinds of ad hoc connections such as Palm III beaming, Pendleton said. The Palm is literally pointed at its target, whereas a Bluetooth device will “discover” all other Bluetooth devices in range and may require a pass code or personal ID number to allow communication with them. Extended’s conclusion is that some devices will end up using the Bluetooth and IrDA standards in tandem.

The company has paid less attention to the emerging 802.11 and HomeRF standards. The 802.11 standard for wireless Ethernet is closer to the PC than most of Extended’s work, Pendleton said; as for HomeRF, the company simply hasn’t moved into the radio frequency arena yet.

EE Times February 29, 2000 page 39