ICSI develops Bluetooth USB dongle reference design

Integrated Circuit Solution Inc. has announced that it has successfully developed a Bluetooth USB dongle reference design that allows electronic devices to become Bluetooth-enabled.

Based on the company's IC9000 Bluetooth baseband and link management controller IC, the dongle combines USB plug-and-play and embedded Bluetooth functionality to address "add-on" products such as desktops and laptops. "The plug-and play Bluetooth USB dongle can drive this Bluetooth market by allowing everyone to have Bluetooth-enabled connectivity at very competitive costs," said Jiin Lee, VP of Logic R&D, ICSI.

The reference design includes a USB dongle PCB layout, protocol stack and profile, hardware/firmware under HCI, a testing environment for production, and debugging tools.

The IC9000 adopts a Turbo 8052 core with embedded 128KB of mask ROM, 32KB of SRAM, and HCI and PCM interfaces. It operates at a full Bluetooth data rate at 723KBps and supports up to 7 ACL links and up to 3 SCO voice channels in a piconet. Other features include master-slave role switching and park, sniff and hold modes to meet the low power consumption application needs.