The Bluetooth platform developed by CSR is a single-mode, single-chip low-energy platform. Low-energy Bluetooth systems are important to the wireless communications sector for applications like remote controls, health and well-being devices, computer interface devices, automotive RKE functionality, smart-energy appliances, and proximity tagging. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) has already adopted the Bluetooth v4.0 specification. In fact, CSR has qualified its products relative to the new standard.
The firm's Bluetooth platform is designed to provide everything that designers need to develop a Bluetooth low-energy product with RF, baseband, microcontroller, a qualified Bluetooth v4.0 stack, and the customer application. All of these features run on a single chip incorporated in the CSR μEnergy platform. That platform includes four quadrature decoders, three analog inputs for sensor data, and digital serial connectors.
The chips have direct antenna connections and three pulsewidth modulation outputs for variable power control in applications like lighting control. They can run in optimized sleep modes with currents down to 600 nA. Two options are available whereby the CSR1000 and CSR1001 can act as a master or slave using CSR's Bluetooth v4.0 host stack. That stack provides the Generic Access Profile (GAP), L2CAP, Security Manager, Attribute Protocol (ATT), and Generic Attribute Profile (GATT).
In other news, CSR recently acquired APT Licensing Ltd. This move is expected to allow CSR to further utilize apt-x, low-latency audio-compression codecs in its future products. The apt-x suite of audio-compression algorithms is particularly suited to Bluetooth technology.