re: Bluetooth Chips & Bluetooth Applications
The price of Bluetooth chipset has always been a controversial topic. Whilst some clarity is beginning to appear, the problems relate to understanding what application the chipset is being asked to support. Peter Dykes listens to the industry explain its viewpoint.
>> Gimme Five - Shifting Silicon
Peter Dykes
Bluetooth World
Issue 6
01 December 2001
Since Bluetooth first came off the drawing board, the figure of $5 has been held up as the threshold beyond which the technology will become a viable proposition. This benchmark figure was originally mooted by the Bluetooth SIG as the price for replacing a PC printer cable with a Bluetooth link. It is odd, therefore, that the price point has become something of a holy grail, given the sheer number and diversity of vertical markets potentially open to the technology. The figure has also been bandied about indiscriminately, blurring the distinction between the $5 solution and the $5 chipset. The two are, of course, entirely different issues, but are inextricably interlinked.
There are now a number of silicon vendors with sub-$5 chipsets which include baseband processor and a Bluetooth radio. Indeed, Silicon Wave, whose products are now available to OEMs through an IP licensing programme, are claiming OEMs now have a fast path to a $5 solution with the integration of baseband functionality into SoC ASIC designs and can achieve the world's smallest Bluetooth solution. CSR, with its 'all CMOS' approach, is also offering sub-$5 chips, but reckons it can go further.
Alan Woolhouse, CSR's vice president, communications says: "Products which we will make available next year will be offering everything on a chip. All the necessary active components will be there to provide full functionality." He added however, that this was not a 'one size fits all' approach but rather one which produces specific chipsets for certain applications.
He says: "We will provide different combinations of features for what we consider to be the key market segments. For example, we know in advance what the functions of a Bluetooth headset will be and can therefore develop the appropriate solution on a chip."
BrightCom's CEO and president, Yuval Ben Ze'ev, does not go for the single solution idea either. "The sheer magnitude of diverse vertical Bluetooth markets, as well as the explicit feature set of each, will dictate the employment of application specific processors solutions," he comments.
He continues: "The real question about the $5 solution should be '$5 for what?' Connecting a printer to a PC is very different to connecting a cellphone. To begin with, power consumption is not an issue for a mains-powered printer but low consumption is crucial for battery powered devices. In addition, different applications address the Bluetooth stack in different ways, making interoperability more complex."
Bryce Johnstone, worldwide short distance wireless business development manager at Texas Instruments is one who, while believing the sub-$5 solution is achievable and is a useful benchmark, concedes it is not quite as important as is often made out. He says: "$5 solutions will really make people sit up and take notice of Bluetooth as a viable technology. However, for mass consumer applications to really take off, the important thing is that Bluetooth should make very little impact on the price paid by the end user. If you consider that a cellphone can be Bluetooth enabled for between $25 and $30 right now, it is clear that solutions are already well within limits acceptable to the customer."
The ultimate goal, of course, is that the cost of Bluetooth functionality will fall to the point where its inclusion will cease to be an issue in terms of what the end user pays for a particular device. Troy Holtby, product manager at 3Com says: "The way I see it, there's a strong parallel with CD-ROM drives a few years ago. If you wanted to buy a PC with a CD-ROM on board, it would cost you extra. Nowadays though, if you don't want one, the price of the PC remains much the same, so you might as well have one." He adds: "Bluetooth will approach this paradigm when the cost of functionality drops below $5. This is particularly important given Bluetooth offers little that can't already be done using existing, albeit proprietary, methods."
Chip development is only one factor which will drive down the price of Bluetooth solutions, however, and history has shown that as a technology becomes more popular and widely available, economies of scale from volume production become at least, if not more important than advances in chip development. But if low-cost applications are to lead the way, will they be popular enough to create the required momentum to drive costs even lower? Eric Nguyen the senior product marketing manager at Oki Semiconductor says: "I believe that only a handful of applications such as headsets, PDAs and PCs will have enough volume to drive to the $5 solution. These applications are in the low margin, high volume market and that requires the $5 price."
Indeed, Nguyen is not alone in this view. Mike Beadsmoore, customer development director at Red-M says: "Every PDA vendor, with the exception of Handspring, has plans to integrate Bluetooth into their devices, all the emerging Korean PDA vendors are planning to do the same and all PC manufacturers are planning to launch PDAs as they see desktop and notebook sales declining." 3Com's Holby also believes companies are pinning their hopes, for the next 12 months at least, on personal devices to drive the market forward.
To get the ball rolling, however, Bluetooth has to provide applications that will prove attractive to customers. Sean O'Sullivan, CEO of Dublin-based RococoSoft says: "First we think you'll see a baseline set of devices appear in the marketplace, with Bluetooth integrated phones, PDAs and some headsets. Once these appear, some simple applications are possible - simple, but compelling for consumers. For example, Palm have added some straightforward SMS applications, that allow a user to read, reply to, store and send SMSs from the Palm, via a Bluetooth-enabled phone. Simple? Yes. But once you've actually done it, two things happen. First, you never again want to use the cellphone as the SMS device, because the PDA has better screen size and usability. Second, you're likely to use SMS more often as it now just became a 'lot' easier." He adds, however: "A more complex example is that people will start to use real applications across their devices.
A great example is Synchropoint, which makes 'meeting management' software that runs on Palms and uses Bluetooth." With this software on the PDA, a team at a meeting can collaborate wirelessly during the meeting, share notes, minutes, contact details and instant messages with each other and also walk away with a real time record of the meeting.
Many market watchers think that such corporate applications will in fact be the early market drivers, rather than the simple consumer applications, but either way, most agree it will take at least another nine to 12 months before Bluetooth really becomes popular. Claudia Arango, wireless industry manager at Deloitte Consulting says: "If companies can see areas in which Bluetooth can offer cost reductions, such as real-time communication from field sales staff to management and possibly even to production ordering, they will be quick to take advantage. Once people are using Bluetooth at work, they will inevitably begin to use it outside the office and so it will percolate into the consumer market."
Dick Clark, a consultant at Consult Hyperion agrees, but claims slightly different reasons. He says: "Remember that Bluetooth in its first incarnation is a cable replacement technology. True ad hoc networking, introducing any device to another, is a very compelling vision but is unlikely to be where initial applications develop. Ad hoc networking enabled by Bluetooth is cheap compared to other technologies, but the environments where we will see early successes are those that are not so price sensitive. What is still being worked on are effective security processes to facilitate these applications. Once these are overcome useful deployments will start to occur."
O'Sullivan comments: "It seems primarily that applications will drive adoption, whether it's business adoption where companies find applications that can increase the efficiency of field personnel, or consumer adoption, where consumers get simple ease of use, or new functionality. This being true, and because writing applications that use Bluetooth is right now too hard, Rococo is providing tools and services to make writing mobile collaboration applications easier. Without such tools, we envisage a 'Bluetooth Bottleneck' emerging - lots of hardware, nothing useful I can run across that hardware."
Of course, most companies producing Bluetooth solutions are also offering development kits and if interest in these is proportionately as great as that being shown in other mobile technologies such as GPRS, predictions about market growth should not be too far of the mark by this time next year. Indeed, it would be hard to find a sector of the communications industry and in particular the mobile sector that is genuinely optimistic about its future and, as importantly, has such good grounds for being so. <<
- Eric - |
