10 February 2009

Broadcom Combo Chip For Portable Devices With ARM Cortex

Broadcom Corporation, a member of the ARM Connected Community, has debuted the Broadcom BCM2075 combo chip featuring highly integrated global positioning system (GPS), Bluetooth, FM radio, delivering location based services (LBS) and advanced multimedia.

The BCM2075 has been designed as a a cost effective solution for portable devices, such as mobile handsets, portable media players (PMPs) and personal navigation devices (PNDs), that wish to integrate Bluetooth, GPS and FM transceiver functionality and is backwards compatible with Broadcom's BCM2049 combo chip announced in October 2008.  It includes an ARM Cortex-M3 processor that provides low power consumption for optimum connectivity operation and effective multimedia processing resulting in longer handset battery life. Supported by Broadcom's World Wide Reference Network (WWRN) for accurate indoor and outdoor positioning, the BCM2075 enables advanced LBS, regardless of user location.

The Broadcom BCM2075 combo chip includes four radios (Bluetooth, GPS and FM receive and transmit), and in conjunction with InConcert collaborative co-existence technology, allows these radios to operate simultaneously, and with minimal interference.

"The success of our combo chips highlights the individual strengths of our Bluetooth, GPS and FM connectivity technologies and advanced combo architectures that enable these advanced solutions to work well together on the same silicon die," explained Robert A. Rango, Senior Vice President & General Manager of Broadcom's Wireless Connectivity Group.  "Our new BCM2075 combo chip will help drive the key handset applications that network operators and consumers are looking to adopt, making location based services and advanced multimedia available on a wider range of mid-range mobile phones."

Market research company iSuppli forecasts GPS will grow significantly as a handset feature by 2012, to over 543 million units, with Bluetooth achieving more than 1.2 billion units and FM radio appearing in 901 million units in the same timeframe.

The Bluetooth core is architected for high functionality and low power requirements, and is fully compliant with version 2.1 and enhanced data rate (EDR) technology.  It features SmartAudi voice enhancement technology, which improves the audio quality and the range of headset connections and includes Broadcom's packet loss concealment (PLC) and wide-band speech technologies that compensate for lost data packets while delivering clearer digital voice communications. 

In conjunction with Broadcom's BTE-Mobile, Windows Mobile, and Android software stacks, the BCM2075 supports multiple simultaneous Advanced Audio Distribution Profile (AADP) streams, enabling music sharing between multiple stereo Bluetooth headsets, creating a wireless networked music environment.  Additionally, the BCM2075 contains on-chip processing for the most popular multimedia codecs including MP3, ADC and AAC/AAC+ that allows the host to offload 90% of this processing to the BCM2075, further increasing battery life.

The BCM2075 includes all the FM receiver features required for an advanced FM radio product including high receiver sensitivity with a 3dB improvement over previous Broadcom products, station information enhancements through intelligent Radio Data Service (RDS) and Radio Broadcast Data Service (RBDS) processing, and superior tuning and station search functions for worldwide frequency bands from 65 to 108MHz.  The combo chip's FM transmitter supports programmable output power and a sophisticated algorithm that recommends the best transmit frequency for the user to broadcast to the car radio or home FM receiver.  The FM transceiver supports both small form factor FM antennas that can be integrated within the handset or traditional external headset wires.

Broadcom confirmed that the BCM2075 GPS/Bluetooth/FM combination chip is now sampling to early access customers.