Texas Instruments (TI) has announced its next generation BlueLink 6.0 platform, which combines Bluetooth wireless technology with high fidelity FM stereo and mono performance on a single chip. The BlueLink 6.0 platform provides complete hardware and software support, enabling ease of design and speeding time to market for mobile device manufacturers, the company says. In addition, TI’s solution supports streaming FM stereo music from the handset to a Bluetooth-enabled headset.

Since both Bluetooth and FM functions are integrated on the same silicon, the solution ensures optimal RF co-existence between the two functions, and also provides significant power savings in the most commonly used modes of operation, such as page and inquiry scan. The BlueLink 6.0 single chip also incorporates TI’s Bluetooth/WLAN co-existence hardware and software solution, providing a collaborative interface with TI’s WiLink mobile WLAN solution for optimal bandwidth and resource sharing.

The BlueLink 6.0 platform includes TI’s BlueLink Bluetooth and FM Protocol Stacks and all software required to work with TI’s OMAP platforms and OMAP-Vox chipsets for GSM, GPRS, EDGE, WCMA and UMTS. The solution offers designers the flexibility to work with Linux, Microsoft Windows Mobile or Symbian operating systems.

TI said further that its BlueLink 6.0 platform (BRF6350) is the industry’s smallest Bluetooth and FM single-chip solution providing the lowest total system cost, and is manufactured in TI’s DRP technology at 90 nanometer. The integration of Bluetooth and FM allows customers to realize significant cost and size savings due to shared resources, reduction of external components and shrinkage of the total die size, the company claims, adding that the solution cuts board space by 25 percent compared to discrete solutions.