Bluetooth Everywhere

I’m the type of person who gets enthusiastic about people or companies who decide to be a leader, and not a follower. Some of these companies have an engineer in their corporate offices who makes far-reaching business decisions based upon technical-prowess (that means that they do something because it’s really cool to do) and because of financial sound-ness (that means that they can make some money from it, too). One of these companies in my opinion is Broadcom. Last month, at the 2009 CES show, Broadcom conducted a technology demonstration of the next-generation Bluetooth technology (2.2/3.0 - we don’t know the version number yet). They were able to achieve data rates up to 24 Mb/s, and they achieved this by running Bluetooth data over a WiFi transport! This capability is a part of the Bluetooth AMP technology. So, for 2009 here’s what you can expect the Bluetooth landscape to look like:

• Bluetooth Low Energy 1.0
  • data rate - 1 Mb/s
  • battery life - 1 year
• Bluetooth 2.1 +EDR
  • data rate - 3 Mb/s
  • battery life - days
• Bluetooth 2.2/3.0 (Bluetooth High Speed Technology)
  • Two flavors available:
    • 802.11 / Wifi transport (called 10x technology)
      • data rate - 24 Mb/s
      •  battery life - hours
    • Ultra Wide Band (UWB) transport (called 100x technology)
      • data rate - 200-400 Mb/s
      • battery life - ?

The newest versions of the specifications should be completed in mid-2009. So are you excited?

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 1st, 2009 at 20:42 and is filed under Bluetooth 3.0, Bluetooth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.