CSR Announced Strong Bluetooth Smart Growth

CSR has announced that it has seen strong and growing year-on-year demand for Bluetooth Smart technology.

“CSR (News - Alert) has an unequalled heritage in Bluetooth and has been instrumental in the progression of the technology, and helped to write the Bluetooth Smart standard to meet the needs of the rapidly evolving consumer electronics market,” said Joep van Beurden, CEO at CSR. “Our team continues to combine disruptive thinking, a hunger for innovation and over a decade of experience in Bluetooth development to create powerful Bluetooth Smart platforms that are enabling the growth of the Internet of Things. Our solutions simplify complex challenges and help customers develop breakthrough wireless products quickly, which is why we continue to see strong uptake from customers.”

The company has scored some major deals with major manufacturers, including Lenovo (News - Alert), Incipio and Tanita. CSR has partnered with Lenovo to develop the S9 and S52 Smart TVs, which are the first smart TVs with Bluetooth Smart remote controls.

Bluetooth Smart is a new version of the wireless networking standard that’s intended for embedded devices. Also known as Bluetooth Low Power, as the name suggests, it has lower power consumption for smart “Internet of Things” devices to run off of small batteries, such as the kind found in watches.

Other applications that CSR has been involved with include smart backup batteries with Incipio (News - Alert) and smart weight scales from Tanita. Both of these are based on CSR’s CSR1010 and CSR1011 single-chip solutions.

Samsung has also chosen CSRmesh to build its smart lighting platform.

OEM providers like CSR are indispensable to manufacturers because vendors can just use off-the-shelf components to get consumer products on store shelves without having to design their own Bluetooth Smart hardware.

The company’s importance to manufacturers, especially with an emerging technology, is why van Beurden is optimistic about the company’s future.

“We continue to see the potential for explosive Bluetooth Smart growth over the coming quarters and years,” he said. “This is being driven in part by the opportunity to use a Bluetooth Smart Ready smartphone, or tablet, as a gateway to the cloud, for Internet of Things applications. We believe this technology, which is natively supported by all major operating systems and is already available in the majority of smartphones and tablets from major manufacturers, will result in the proliferation of an ecosystem of peripherals around such devices.”