CSR's BlueCore Serial Protocol Embraced by Windows CE.NET; CSR's BlueCore Serial Protocol Incorporated into Windows Operating Systems.

Business Editors, High-Tech Writers

RICHARDSON, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 1, 2001

CSR (Cambridge Silicon Radio), today announced that its BlueCore Serial Protocol (BCSP), Host Controller Interface transport protocol, (HCI) is to be incorporated into Microsoft's Windows CE.NET operating system as part of the Bluetooth driver.

BCSP is a reliable and efficient transport protocol for the Bluetooth HCI.

Microsoft has incorporated BCSP into their latest version of Windows CE, Windows CE.NET (formerly codenamed `Talisker'). This is an integrated development environment for creating/developing smart mobile devices such as PDAs, and will allow developers to design the next generation of Bluetooth-enabled devices.

"CSR is committed to help standardize the industry to ensure interoperability between different devices and continue the widespread adoption of Bluetooth technology," said Eric Janson, vice president North America, CSR. "By including BCSP in its operating system, Microsoft is supplying developers with the tools needed to meet the increasing demand for Bluetooth-enabled devices."

BCSP offers a more advanced alternative to currently defined protocols such as H4/UART and H3/RS232. It offers error checking and retransmission to accommodate any dropped data during `wake-up', and flow control for several logical channels, while simultaneously reducing the processing overhead. BCSP allows the power consumption of Bluetooth radios to be significantly decreased in idle modes, thus increasing the battery life in handheld devices. Developers are able to link at HCI, L2CAP, RFCOMM or SDP layers, which provides further flexibility for software developers writing embedded Bluetooth applications.

"Microsoft sees the demand for lower power consumption, great cost-performance wireless protocols like Bluetooth growing exponentially," said Keith White, senior director of marketing for the Embedded and Appliance Platforms Group at Microsoft Corp. "The combination of CSR's innovative single-chip radio devices and Windows CE.NET will help ensure the interoperability and the lower total cost of ownership of Bluetooth-enabled devices."

BCSP is supplied as part of CSR's development system, in the form of a pre-compiled Windows DLL, with an API defined in the accompanying documentation. CSR also provides portable C source code so that BCSP can be easily ported to non-PC environments.

About CSR

CSR (Cambridge Silicon Radio) specializes in providing single-chip radio devices to the global market for short-range wireless communications, including Bluetooth(TM). The company's mission is to create the most highly integrated radio devices available, fabricated using standard CMOS technology, to provide its customers with the lowest cost of ownership of high quality digital radio.

CSR was the first company in the world to offer a true single-chip Bluetooth solution with a fully integrated 2.4GHz radio, baseband and microcontroller on one CMOS chip, with its BlueCore(TM)01. Together with external Flash ROM containing the CSR Bluetooth software stack, it provides a fully compliant solution for data and voice communications. Combined with an upper layer host software stack CSR is able to offer a one-stop-shop for customers requiring a complete Bluetooth end-to-end solution. BlueCore01 is now designed into nearly 50 percent of end-user products qualified to the Bluetooth 1.1 standard as listed on the qualified products page of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) website. CSR is headquartered in Cambridge, UK, with offices in Richardson, Texas, Tokyo, Japan, Singapore and Aalborg, Denmark.

More information about CSR can be found at www.csr.com.