The debate about which technology will dominate Wireless Personal Area Networks should be well and truly over by now, but it remains too much of a temptation for chip designers to be happy with a straight fight between ZigBee and Z-Wave, so increasingly Bluetooth Low Energy keeps rearing its head.
Supporters say that since every phone has Bluetooth in it, it can speak to the phone community far more easily than a home hub that has to convert from ZigBee to WiFi in order to speak to a portable device.
With that in mind we keep out eye on new players going the Bluetooth route and this week Silicon Vision a UK fabless semiconductor design house which focuses entirely on RF silicon, has partnered with India IT consulting group Mindtree to offer a Bluetooth Low Energy intellectual property solution for wireless personal area networks.
This partnership came about around an unnamed Asian installation which is building out Wireless Personal Area Networks within its footprint, presumably an equipment supplier which has convinced an operator to deploy a Bluetooth home hub or something similar. It is likely these will first appear inside home routers or home gateways.
The two companies have integrated Silicon Vision’s RF PHY intellectual property for Bluetooth low energy, with Mindtree’s baseband and low-footprint protocol stack, in a way that is compliant with the Bluetooth Low Energy 4.0 spec, and it says it has competitive power consumption figures. The nodes themselves are being built by TSMC and SMIC.
The key to building out nodes is that eventually if you are going to have 100 devices in a home talking to one another, they will need to have batteries that last the equipment’s lifetime, and cost about $1 each to make the chips.
That’s the main point behind Bluetooth, that there are so many devices being made that the cost per chip is already very tiny, even when compared with ZigBee. Tarek Elesseily, CEO of Silicon Vision, said, ‘We have developed a unique licensable RF intellectual property solution that supports Bluetooth low energy. With Mindtree dominating the independent IP provider space worldwide for BLE baseband, protocol stack and profiles today, we believe that our integrated solution will help realize the vision of millions of consumer electronics products to operate wirelessly for months or even years on tiny cell batteries. Our aim is to be the market leader within this sector with our ultra-low power, fully integrated and quickly portable solution forming part of many consumer electronics products.’
Markets for Bluetooth Smart devices include healthcare, sports and fitness, security, and home entertainment and analysts say Bluetooth Smart will be present in 35% all wireless sports and fitness monitoring devices (like pedometers and heart-rate monitors) shipped during 2013 and in over 70 percent by 2018.
At IBC we saw ZigBee chip maker Greanpeak claim it has convinced about 7 of the top ten set top makers to include a ZigBee hub in the set top and to use ZigBee in the remote control. Silicon Vision says it is targeting the exact same market, and that integration of this technology into remote controls offer non-line-of-sight control, voice control, gesture control, touch control and motion detection at the remote device.