Rappore said it designed its technology to be a "drop-in" method for installing Bluetooth radio communications in VCRs, medical instruments, light switches, thermostats, printers, toys and hundreds of other embedded electronic products. It consists of a Bluetooth protocol stack on a microcontroller, which is designed to work in conjunction with the main microcontroller in the appliance.

By preloading a Bluetooth protocol stack onto a controller, Rappore engineers hope to shave months off the time typically needed for developers to endow their products with Bluetooth capabilities. While many OEMs want to build products that can be remotely accessed through Bluetooth, they are hesitant to do so because of the difficulty of implementing the protocol stack, Rappore said. By some estimates, such efforts require an average of 6.5 engineers and 14 months, the company said.

Bluetooth-on-Chip could change that, Rappore said. "Bluetooth-on-Chip tries to eliminate as much of the software development time as possible," said Jasper Pan, cofounder of Rappore (San Jose, Calif.). "If you can put all the software on a chip, you can take away a lot of the operating system dependencies and processor dependencies."

Rappore prototyped the technology on an 8-bit PIC microcontroller from Microchip Technology Inc. Company engineers said the 22-MHz controller's 2-k of ROM was sufficient to hold all their Bluetooth commands. Bluetooth-on-Chip implements a subset of the Bluetooth 1.1 specification and contains over a dozen Bluetooth commands for sending and receiving instructions, the company said.

Rappore said it will soon transport its technology to Intel Corp.'s MCS51 family of microcontrollers.

Some industry vendors said Bluetooth-on-Chip could serve an important function as product developers make their first pass at implementing Bluetooth technology. "From an engineering point of view, adding Bluetooth is a very involved process that requires lots of effort and radio expertise," said Ron Huff, operations manager for the Mobile GT platform effort at Motorola Inc. (Austin, Texas). Engineers typically run into trouble, Huff said, because any device with Bluetooth capabilities is regarded by the Federal Communications Commission as a transceiver, and therefore is subject to FCC qualifications, as well as Bluetooth certification.

"If you can use a precertified version, it's a nice way of grabbing Bluetooth and implementing it on the run, without the need for a lot of specialized knowledge," Huff said.