Brainboxes, the Bluetooth and serial PC add on specialists, and CSR (Cambridge Silicon Radio) have announced that they are to partner to allow Brainboxes to develop integrated, accredited Bluetooth reference designs which will help speed time to market for manufacturers seeking to include Bluetooth functionality in their goods.

The first jointly developed reference design will be unveiled at this year’s Bluetooth Congress in Amsterdam, and will include CSR’s Bluecore02 chip alongside additional hardware and software from Brainboxes.

“We have always regarded CSR as the leading chip supplier in the world of Bluetooth,” remarks Eamonn Walsh, managing director of Brainboxes, “both our companies are based within the UK, and both maintain expertise in-house. Together we bring better products to all our customers, whether they are simply buying modules direct from us, or wishing to integrate Bluetooth into their own designs.”

“The partnership agreement is mutually beneficial and will fortify both our businesses to the benefit of the end user,” adds Clive Chelsom-Pill Commercial manager of CSR , “Our customer base for the Bluecore chip is built upon the principles of low integration cost, rapid time to market and accredited design, the products that we are co-developing with Brainboxes strengthen these underlying benefits.”

Brainboxes and CSR have worked closely alongside one another in the past, all Brainboxes Bluetooth products are based upon Cambridge Silicon Radio’s BlueCore chip, but the announcement is the first formal signing of an agreement between the two Bluetooth companies. A wide range of Bluetooth products is already available from Brainboxes, including PCMCIA, USB and CompactFlash.

About CSR
CSR (Cambridge Silicon Radio) specialises in providing single-chip radio devices to the global market for short-range wireless communications, including Bluetooth™. The company’s mission is to create the most highly integrated radio devices available, fabricated using standard CMOS technology, to provide its customers with the lowest cost of ownership of high quality digital radio.

CSR was the first company in the world to offer a true single-chip Bluetooth solution with BlueCore, a fully integrated 2.4 GHz radio, baseband and microcontroller. In Q4 2001 CSR released BlueCore2, its second generation family, and offer developed hardware/software bundles for each of the fastest growing Bluetooth applications markets. Users can combine the chips with the CSR Bluetooth software stack to provide a fully compliant solution for data and voice communications or, used with an upper layer host software stack, CSR is able to offer a complete Bluetooth end-to-end solution.

CSR has a growing list of major international companies including Sony, Compaq, IBM, Fujitsu, LG, ALPS, TDK, 3com, Mitsumi, Siemens and Motorola, who have already used CSR’s Bluecore in the development of a range of Bluetooth products. In fact, up to the end of 2001, 70% of available pre-qualified modules, as listed on the qualified products page of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) web site, feature Bluecore01 and it is in 60% of all qualified Bluetooth v 1.1 enabled end product designs.

CSR is headquartered in Cambridge, UK, with offices in Richardson, Texas; Tokyo, Japan; Singapore and Aalborg, Denmark.

More information about CSR can be found on the web site at www.csr.com.