CSR adds GPS to Bluetooth/FM Single-Chip
Saturday 09th February 2008, 12:20:00 PM, written by ArunIn the last few years, many Bluetooth chips have started integrating FM receivers and, eventually, FM transmitters. This trend has been well received by the handheld industry and it is very cost-effective, but it doesn't resolve the long-term problem facing CSR and a few others: larger companies such as Broadcom, Qualcomm and NXP have broader IP portfolios and want to integrate everything into the baseband to eat away CSR's business. This product from Broadcom is a good example of that.
CSR seems to have multiple strategies against that trend, including the introduction of proprietary technology in BlueCore6 that gives them a substantial power-efficiency advantage when a handheld and a headset use that same codec. And since there's no reason to expect CSR to give up their leadership position in headsets where there's basically nothing to integrate, that approach makes a lot of sense.
Today's announcement of a single-chip Bluetooth/FM/GPS (following their acquisition of two GPS companies a year ago) is another quite exciting move, not the least because it could get a lot of market traction and turn out in quite a few mobile phones sooner rather than later. There are several points to consider here:
- Assuming that the FM transceiver integrates both a receiver and a transmitter, which it very likely does, this represents the integration of 3 chips into 1 for the Portable Navigation Device market (Bluetooth/FM RX+TX/GPS generally being discrete).
- CSR's approach to GPS is to only integrate the RF and let the application processor act as a baseband using software they recently announced (and which also works for discrete GPS RF chips). They claim this strategy actually improves power efficiency in practice, while obviously lowering costs.
- The company is also working on a number of other technologies, including UWB, Bluetooth ULP, and WiFi, and these will likely all be sold as discrete components but also mixed together in various single-chip configurations.
- The goal is simple: allow maximum differentiation between both manufacturers and individual models based on these solutions. That's an advantage CSR hopes to have against solutions that are integrated on the baseband or application processor.
It will definitely be interesting to see whether CSR manages to beat baseband integration. This is a bet they obviously had to make by necessity because of their relatively narrow focus compared to some competitors, but they seem to be doing an outstanding job at coming up with strategies and products that might manage to keep them competitive for a long time to come.
