Hello and welcome to the Texas Instruments Bluetooth low energy blog. My name is Karl Torvmark, and part of what I do at TI is to specify what TI’s upcoming single-mode Bluetooth low energy devices will do. A few of my colleagues and I will be updating this blog regularly with new information about Bluetooth low energy and TI’s activities in this field.
 
To start off, I think it makes sense to provide a very quick overview of Bluetooth low energy. This exciting new standard grew out of work being done inside Nokia’s Research department, and went through a couple of name changes (anybody remember Wibree or Ultra-Low Power Bluetooth?) before being merged into the Bluetooth SIG and being called Bluetooth low energy (BTLE or BLE for short, although the SIG marketing people says we can’t abbreviate the name –  how they think they can prevent engineers from abbreviating anything I do not know). Bluetooth low energy makes some important changes from regular (classic?) Bluetooth to enable much longer battery lifetime, especially for systems that don’t send a lot of data, while still being similar enough to regular Bluetooth that it is easy to add BTLE support to regular Bluetooth ICs.
 
This brings up an important point – when we talk about Bluetooth low energy we talk about dual-mode and single-mode devices. I have seen a lot of confusion around these concepts. Basically, a Bluetooth low energy device cannot communicate with classic Bluetooth devices, because changes to the Physical Layer (PHY) and packet format had to be made to reduce the power consumption. However, it is really easy to modify a regular Bluetooth IC to also support BTLE, even if this requires a few changes to the physical silicon. Most of the major providers of Bluetooth silicon, including TI, have already committed to making these changes, forming dual-mode ICs, which can communicate both with classic Bluetooth devices as well as BTLE devices. The other piece of the puzzle is the so-called single-mode device. If you want to make absolutely the most power-efficient IC, you can take advantage of some of the changes made in the Bluetooth low energy specifications and create a device that uses a fraction of the power used by a classic (or even a dual-mode) Bluetooth device. The reason for this is that the BTLE specifications relax some of the more stringent requirements of the regular Bluetooth specification (in tech-speak called BR/EDR, for Basic Rate [1 Mbps] and Enhanced Data Rate [2 and 3 Mbps]). However, a such single-mode device can only talk to other single-mode devices or dual-mode devices, not with “classic” Bluetooth devices. This is not such a bad trade-off as you may think, since all the major Bluetooth IC vendor will be making dual-mode ICs, and people have a tendency to change their mobile phones quite often, even in the current economy. This means that in just a few years, BTLE devices will have hundreds of millions of devices (mobile phones, PCs, MP3 players and so on) to talk to.
 
Now, over to the recent events in Tokyo. In conjunction with the annual Bluetooth All-Hands Meeting, the Bluetooth SIG hosted a one-day public seminar called the Developers’ Preview, which covered both technical and commercial aspects of Bluetooth low energy. There was also a roadmap session held by some of the vendors, where they presented their future BLE-related plans. TI was one of the vendors presenting, and in my opinion we had some pretty interesting news:
 
We reaffirmed our previous commitment to providing both dual-mode and single-mode Bluetooth low energy solutions, but we were also able to go into more detail concerning our upcoming single-mode products. What I feel is the biggest piece of news is that we have already working single-chip single-mode silicon - something we believe is a world’s first. We call this product the CC2540. Because of Japanese radio regulations, we were not able to show a live demo in Tokyo, but we did put together a video – have a look here.
 
Let me clarify what we mean by “single-chip” – by our definition, this is a device that includes the BLE radio, and that is able to run both the BLE protocol stack as well as the application. In Bluetooth terms, this means that we implement the Controller, the Host as well as the Application, all in a single chip. Basically, this means that if you want to implement a Bluetooth low energy sensor, you only need to hook up your sensor (analog or digital) directly to the CC2540, provide a power source and that is all you need to implement your sensor.
 
When it comes to power sources, our demo ran on a CR2032 coin-cell, validating Bluetooth low energy’s stated target of extending Bluetooth’s reach into the realm of ultra-low power, where devices can run on tiny coin cells or even energy harvesting solutions, harnessing ambient light, vibration or temperature differences. This is going to open up for many exciting new applications that previously were not practical to implement with “classic” Bluetooth.
 
We will also provide the whole BLE solution; not only the CC2540 IC, but also a royalty-free single-mode Bluetooth low energy protocol stack, including profile support as well as development kits, tools and application examples. Speaking of development kits, there was quite a bit of interest around our announcement that we will be offering a $99 BLE development kit. We strongly believe that Bluetooth low energy has the potential to be a mass-market technology, and for this to happen, the barriers to developers to work with the technology needs to be as low as possible. We know that getting managers to sign POs is hard these days, but $99 should be a low amount by any standard to be able to start working with such a promising new wireless technology. Not that the development kit is a crippled one either – it will contain a sensor node as well as a USB dongle. Both of these can be reprogrammed with your own code, and we provide application examples to get you started. The day you get hold of a BTLE-enabled mobile phone, the sensor node will talk to that also.
 
To finish off, I hope you found this information useful, and would like to welcome you to make comments or post questions to this blog. Our hope is that this blog can become an interactive experience, rather than a series of monologs.
 
See you soon,
 
Karl