Motorola adds Bluetooth baseband to Dragonball processor

By Tony Santiago
EE Times
(05/01/02, 11:53:08 AM EDT)

SINGAPOREMotorola's Semiconductor Products Sector is launching a version of its DragonBall MX1 microprocessor that integrates a Bluetooth baseband hardware accelerator.

The fifth-generation DragonBall, designed at Motorola's Singapore design center, integrates Bluetooth wireless communications capability without external add-ons. The company committed $1 million, about 30 engineers and nine months to perfect the technology that enables the Bluetooth transceiver to work with the microprocessor.

Motorola engineers said they have figured out how to integrate the microprocessor into PDAs, Web tablets, smart phones, and 2.5G and 3G handsets to give those devices Bluetooth capability. The company is about to release its first commercial mobile unit with Bluetooth features.

Motorola expects the first batch of products running on the processor to debut commercially in the second half. The processor is sold only to manufacturers of mobile devices and is priced at $19 each in 10,000-unit quantities.

Lim Cher Eng, Motorola's wireless platform senior manager and the head of the MX1 development team, said the fifth-generation DragonBall sports clock speeds of up to 200 MHz, compared with 66 MHz for older processors, allowing it to support multimedia applications from streaming video, Internet audio, MP3 and MPEG movie files.

Motorola engineers are working on the sixth-generation DragonBall processor, which should be ready by the end of the year. Commercial availability in handheld devices is targeted for the first quarter of 2003.

Lim said handheld devices using the future processor would be able to encode, create or record audio and video files that could be shared wirelessly. "This would be a breakthrough by any standard [when] looking at handhelds more as video powered devices," said Lim.

Research deal

To accelerate technology development in the handheld market, Motorola Electronics and Singapore's Ngee Ann Polytechnic have signed a joint development pact that will focus on designing applications that incorporate Dragonball MX1 processors.

According to Edward Kennedy, a wireless research analyst with Hong Kong-based Axatron Consulting, new applications are possible on a variety of platforms. "We are looking at handheld medical devices, mobile commerce and computing, and biometric devices that will recognize users through physical characteristics such as fingerprints," Kennedy said.

Motorola said it will supply the school with Dragonball MX1 application development boards, a development platform and hardware training, and about $220,000 in project financing.

According to industry projections, the handheld market will grow to more than $7.5 billion annually by 2003. "This joint collaboration will spawn new technologies in the wireless field, especially when Singapore launches its 3G network by 2003 or early 2004," Kennedy said. "We expect some interesting processor developments, especially integrating hardware and applications" as the 3G momentum builds.