December 12, 2001 — San Francisco, CA

MindTree Consulting Launched Flexible Bluetooth Baseband Solutions at Bluetooth Developers Conference in San Francisco
EtherMind product offers complete layers for short-range devices.

In December, MindTree Consulting announced the unveiling of its EtherMind Bluetooth Baseband solution along with - LMP and HCI at the Bluetooth Developers Conference in San Francisco, Calif. MindTree’s portfolio of Bluetooth technologies now includes complete Bluetooth layers for a variety of short-range wireless applications, such as PDAs, cell phones, access points, digital imaging, and digital entertainment.

During the conference, MindTree demonstrated EtherMind through various product implementations, including printing, streaming audio, digital imaging, Internet access and voice applications.

“EtherMind will benefit OEMs who build applications and place a premium on power consumption and physical size” said S.N. Padmanabhan, vice president of hardware engineering for MindTree. “Our experience in concept-to-system product realization services will further benefit the customer by building products much faster and in a cost-effective manner.”

MindTree’s approach to the Baseband design provides maximum flexibility to chip vendors without compromising performance parameters such as processor load and memory requirements. Compliant with Bluetooth 1.1 specifications, the Ethermind Baseband controller is available as silicon proven synthesizable Verilog core with LMP/HCI firmware. This Ethermind Baseband core can be reconfigured to work with any 8/16/32 bit microcontroller on which LMP/HCI firmware resides and be reconfigured to interface with many Bluetooth radio implementations.

Voice applications can easily be built, as the SCL data transfer is supported in the Ethermind Baseband design itself. The core executes all datapath functions with error detection and correction logic in addition to the management and control of the lower layer protocol. The Ethermind Baseband core e also manages channel selection and hopping functions, relieving the host processor(s) to manage only the LMP/HCI layer functions. Intelligent radio control ensures low power consumption in addition to alternately low power features of Bluetooth wireless technology.

The Ethermind Baseband architecture is flexible enough to support various on-chip FIFOs and sizes to enable optimal custom application designs. With minimum processor load and chip power consumption, Fabless companies can easily customize EtherMind to develop the lowest foot print SOC design for any target application.

The EtherMind portfolio has already been licensed by OEMs and included in PDAs, cell phones, set top boxes and access point product designs.