Alcatel's New Bluetooth Chip

Bluetooth and 802.11 seem to be running neck and neck in the short range wireless race and most of us wish that everyone could agree on what we should use to avoid using cables for our SOHO networks while avoiding obsolescence in the coming months and years. Alcatel's latest announcement leans toward the Bluetooth camp and whether you're designing devices or using them, keeping up to date on the wireless world is in your best interest. Alcatel is now sampling a new Bluetooth baseband chip called the MTC-60180, which offers V1.1 functionality, full data rate potential, point-to-multipoint (for piconets where a Bluetooth-enabled device talks to several other devices), and scatternet capability. The MTC-60180 baseband is the first in a family of Bluetooth products to be released over the next year. Various dedicated versions of the baseband will be brought to market from early 2002 and a radio is scheduled to come out in mid-2002. The MTC-60180 includes a baseband controller, ARM7 microprocessor, 48 kByte RAM, a 1-megabit flash for the lower protocol stack and an additional 1-megabit flash for the upper layers and the application, the latter being customizable. Features include low-power consumption, encryption, and park-hold-sniff capability. The MTC-60180 evaluation kit, which is available for several radio chips on the market, includes an evaluation board with radio and baseband, evaluation software, documentation, and a headphone for audio testing.