Toshiba kicked off its work on Bluetooth ICs last year by licensing Nokia's Bluetooth baseband IP. The company followed that with the launch of a baseband chip, the TC35651, for Bluetooth designs. Now Toshiba is making its next chip leap by integrating a homegrown RF front end with its baseband technology on a single IC.

The TC35654, developed in 0.18-micron CMOS, combines an RF front end and ARM7 processor in a 113-pin plastic wireless-frequency land-grid array package measuring 7 x 7 x 0.8 mm. The chip's RF section has a transceiver, low-noise amplifier, mixer, oscillator and power amp. The transceiver supports Class 2 and 3 output power levels.

Baseband moves

On the baseband front, Toshiba is combining hardwired gates and an ARM processor. Most of the baseband capabilities acquired through the Nokia license are handled in hardware gates, said Toshiba's wireless market development manager, Andrew Burt. On the other hand, the 13-MHz ARM processor handles some lower-layer Bluetooth stack functions as well as any upper-layer stack tasks and Bluetooth profiles that designers embed on the chip.

The TC35654 now covers all of the lower-layer tasks, up to the host control interface (HCI) layer, needed in Bluetooth designs. Designers can then implement upper-layer stacks, above HCI, from third-party developers or from Toshiba.

On the memory side, the new IC provides buffer RAM and mask ROM for installing link manager protocol/HCI software. External interfaces are also provided for external RAM, flash and E2PROM components.

The TC35654 baseband operates from a 1.5-volt core while the RF section runs from a 2.5-V supply. I/Os on the chip are either 1.8- or 3-V tolerant.

While Toshiba is focusing on single-chip ICs, Philips has upgraded Bluetooth performance. The first step is the rollout of a new module, the BGP201, for cellular handset designs.

Like past modules, it combines the ARM7-enabled Blueberry baseband processor with the UAA3559 RF transceiver. Building on that, Philips has now embedded 224 kbytes of flash memory into the module. By integrating the flash on-board, Philips product marketing manager Rob Hoeben said Philips is lowering power consumption in Bluetooth-enabled mobiles.

"Handset designs implementing Bluetooth need a monolithic memory to store parameters," Hoeben said. To accomplish this in the past, designers had to send signals over pc board traces to read and write from the flash. By integrating the flash, Hoeben said, Philips is reducing the capacitance encountered during those reads/writes and, in turn, reducing overall power consumption in the mobile.

On the power front, the BGP201 runs from a 1.8-V supply. When handling a voice link, the module will consume between 50 and 60 milliwatts of power, Hoeben said.

The module is supplied in a 9.5 x 11.5 x 1.7-mm LGA package and sports a -82-dBm sensitivity figure. It is also equipped with interfaces for USB, UART and PCM. To implement this module, Philips said, designers need only an external clock source and an antenna.

To make its modules even more power-efficient when handling voice links, Philips is also releasing a new codec solution for its Bluetooth modules.

Samples of Toshiba's TC35654 will be available in February with mass production scheduled for July.

The chip will be priced at $5 in 100,000-piece quantities. Toshiba also plans to introduce a silicon germanium Bluetooth transceiver, dubbed the TB-31296FT. Hoeben said most codecs embedded in Bluetooth modules operate from either 2.5- or 3.3-V supplies.

Philips' BGB201 module is sampling now with volume production ramp scheduled for next year's second quarter. It is priced at $8 in volume quantities.