Product category: Wireless Communications
News Release from: Flextronics - Short Range Wireless | Subject: Elara
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 10 June 2002
Tiny module is complete Bluetooth 1.1
reference
New from BrightCom Technologies, Elara is an ultra-small reference design of a complete Bluetooth 1.1-compliant module.
New from BrightCom Technologies, Elara is an ultra-small reference design of a complete Bluetooth 1.1-compliant module Measuring only 17 x 32 x 5mm, the Elara Bluetooth application module is based on BrightCom's new IntelliBlue BIC2102 application processor, along with an RF module and up to 1Mbyte of Flash memory
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 7 May 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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Optimised solutions for key Bluetooth applications
According to BrightCom, Bluetooth devices need to contain embedded stand-alone intelligence, along with software and additional processing power.
Bluetooth processor comes in under ten bucks
BrightCom Technologies is taking orders for its BIC2101 Bluetooth Application Processor priced at under $10 in volume quantities on a 12-14 week lead-time.
This "daughterboard" design easily connects to a customer's system board via a system connector and is compact enough to be built into a small product, such as an HID peripheral, serial dongle, host or device USB dongle or a PCM/CVSD voice module for an audio headset and gateway.
"Most customers want a plug and play solution for Bluetooth", said Yuval Ben-Ze'ev, BrightCom's President and CEO, "so we created the Elara reference design that provides a complete, integrated Bluetooth solution - including the chips and BrightCore software - on a miniature, plug-in board.
This is a field-proven design enabling customers to rapidly deploy Bluetooth connectivity without having to design or lay out the components for their own Bluetooth modules.
Further reading
Bluetooth processor has power to spare
According to BrightCom, the BIC2102 is the first chip with enough MIPS and data memory to run embedded applications together with the Bluetooth baseband and protocol stack.
Quad-core platform hosts OEM and ODM designs
The scalable G700 uses the quad-core E5335 Intel Xeon processor and the Intel 5000P chipset and maximises available PCI Express I/O through modularity.
Elara is the quickest path to a product".
This easy-to-use philosophy is key to BrightCom's product line.
The company pioneered the Application Processor concept that enables applications to be embedded and run on the baseband processor along with the Bluetooth stack, thereby avoiding the expense and complication of a second processor to run Bluetooth applications.
Power consumption at peak transmit or receive is 110mA (max) and 100uA (max) in "sleep" mode.
The average power consumption can further be reduced with BrightCom's SleepSynch mechanism, which maintains full synchronisation during sleep mode.
This enhanced form of power management allows for sleep periods of as long as 30s - two orders of magnitude better than the Bluetooth standard and recovery to full activity in just a few milliseconds.
By comparison, most alternative solutions limit sleep periods to 250ms and require several seconds to recover - resulting in higher average power consumption.
The Elara design supports a full piconet and features an air bandwidth of 721Kbit/s, a PCM codec interface (for support of either A-law, mu-law or linear codecs), a high-speed UART at 921.6Kbit/s, a USB 1.1-compliant interface for both host and device as well as up to 20 programmable GPIOs, for a substantial reduction in product development time.
A design developed using the Elara general-purpose kit evolves easily into its own prototype board and, from there, into a final product.
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