Next Bluetooth chips to boost call quality

And they are 40 percent smaller than the average

Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR) has announced a new generation of its Bluetooth chips, adding enhancements to boost the quality of voice calls made with Bluetooth headsets. The company is also adding support for other radio standards, starting with FM reception in phones.

The chips in the BlueCore5 family, scheduled for mass production in 2006, are 40 percent smaller than earlier chips, providing greater power efficiency and therefore longer battery life for phones and headsets, according to CSR. The major new feature is BlueMedia, which combines a more powerful on-chip digital signal processor (DSP) with software to boost audio quality and radio functions.

Luke D'Arcy, CSR product marketing manager, commented, "BlueCore5 Multimedia provides twice the DSP horsepower of BlueCore3. This means better quality, which will mean better voice recognition, lower power and lower cost." A ClearVoice Capture (CVC) feature aims to improve the quality of voice calls by filtering out background noise and echoes.

While BlueCore5 Multimedia is intended for headsets, a cheaper version called BlueCore5-ROM is aimed at phones that already include a DSP. In this case, BlueMedia can be adapted to run on the host processor, CSR said. A third chip, BlueCore5-FM, uses the DSP to create a software FM radio. As this supports RDS, drivers can receive traffic alerts on their phones, CSR said.

CSR also plans to make it safer to use car kits to make calls, by adding voice recognition and audio caller ID to BlueMedia. Audio caller ID will speak the name of the incoming caller "so you don't have to look down at your phone to see who is calling", D'Arcy said.