Acer NeWeb Corp, Acer Group’s communications division surprised the Bluetooth community at Comdex, when it announced low cost pricing and shipping dates for Bluetooth chipsets and adapters. The rest of the industry has warned that there will be trade-offs in performance to make up for the cost of the chips. Acer will use Widcomm Inc’s Blue-Connect module in its initial products.
It has signed up Widcomm’s Blue-Connect module design, based on the Bluetooth specification for wireless data transmission and Texas Instruments as a Bluetooth silicon supplier to produce and manufacture the chipset. Following the Blue-Connect(TM) module, Acer will continue to work with Widcomm to produce a series of Bluetooth products, including the PC Dongle, PDA Bluetooth adapter and cell phone Bluetooth adapter.
Blue-Connect will be available in the first quarter of next year for less than $100, said a spokesperson for Acer. The PC Bluetooth Dongle will launch sometime in the third quarter with other Bluetooth products released at the end of the year. These latter price points are yet to be determined, said Acer.
There has been a cloak of mystery surrounding the pricing of Bluetooth ever since it was first announced close on two years ago. According to Warren Allen, senior product planner for computer systems at Toshiba Corp, the chipsets are still far too expensive. He believes that to sell its Bluetooth connect module for less than $100, Acer Neweb has to be losing money. Acer spokespeople declined to comment on how they reached such a low price point.
Currently a Bluetooth module requires three chips – an RF chip, a baseband controller and separate Flash memory – these cost around $30 a chip, Allen said. Several companies including ARM Holdings Plc, Cambridge Silicon Radio and TDK Systems Ltd are working to integrate these components onto one chip. Allen said that integration onto a single die was likely to cut those prices in half. As the manufacturing process gets refined over the next two to three years, Allen predicted, the chips would be less than $7.
Toshiba plans to launch Bluetooth products early next year starting at the high-end with its Tecra line of laptops. Warren said the company will be using a three-chip solution initially, but is currently working on refining this down to one. He declined to say how much Toshiba is spending integrating Bluetooth.
