Oki ramps Bluetooth products

Japan's Oki Electric is ramping up its Bluetooth products, and believes the technology will contribute at least 1bn yen (about £5.6m) to its bottom line this year.

Bluetooth, which lets gadgets wirelessly communicate with each other and with nearby PCs, has been surrounded by hype for years, but only now is beginning to appear in products, following technical delays. Despite the slowdown in the world economy, analysts expect Bluetooth to be built into millions of devices and PCs in the next few months.

Oki, which was one of the first companies in Japan to receive Bluetooth 1.1 certification, is currently producing a Bluetooth baseband controller circuit with a 32-bit RISC (reduced instruction set computing) processor, and plans to upgrade this to 0.18-micron geometry at some point in the future.

The company says it is conducting several R&D projects related to Bluetooth. It is planning CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) RF chips and integrated Bluetooth chips for low-cost products.

Soon all your digital devices could be talking to one another, without wires. Find out the latest in ZDNet UK's Bluetooth News Section.

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