CSR Forges Bluetooth Alliances Through Its New Partner Program; Accelerates Delivery of Advanced Solutions for a Wide Range of Bluetooth Applications.

Business Editors, Technology Writers

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

CSR (Cambridge Silicon Radio) today announced the launch of its new partner program.

Twenty-three independent companies and consultants have now joined the program providing products including development boards, operating systems, software stacks, system design and development services around the world.

By forming this program, CSR aims to provide its customers with unrivalled support to accelerate development efforts and further cut time-to-market for Bluetooth products.

"This is a very significant step to create the most extensive collection of alliances with companies that can help us deliver the world's most advanced solutions for Bluetooth applications. It creates an environment that will help us, our partners and our mutual customers to succeed," commented Clive Chelsom-Pill, partner program manager, CSR. "With agreements signed with twenty three partners already, and a further thirty to be announced shortly we are definitely on track to have the most successful program in the Bluetooth industry, offering the most comprehensive range of fully supported designs for the widest variety of wireless applications."

The growing list of major international companies participating in the partner program falls into five main categories and significantly eases the challenges engineers face designing Bluetooth enabled devices.

Those partners providing software support include Extended Systems, Impulsesoft, Mezoe and WIDCOMM. These leading suppliers offer complete qualified Bluetooth protocol stacks, Bluetooth Windows applications, reference designs and test and development software tools.

CSR's hardware partners include GigaAnt and Protura Wireless, who manufacture off-the-shelf Bluetooth antennas that include a range of internal/embedded and external antennas, helping to reduce product time to market.

CSR's third party design partners include Addvalue Technologies (Singapore), AU System (Sweden), Comitech Systems (Sweden), CRL (UK), Generics (UK), IMST (Germany), Penell (Denmark), PI Technology (UK), Plextek (UK), RTX (Denmark), Stellcom (U.S.), The Technology Partnership (UK), Transpond (UK), Vivid (Singapore) and Flextronics. The third party partners provide consulting services, systems integration, business technology and supply application development services for Bluetooth technology, including electronic hardware development and embedded software development.

CSR's distribution partners and representatives have been carefully selected and provide high levels of Bluetooth technical expertise right through to design-in and application support.

Test equipment partners include Agilent Technologies. This part of the program ensures that CSR's integrated circuits and test equipment are interoperable, allowing engineers to focus on their designs. CSR's customers are able to reliably use its partners test equipment to verify that their application is working as designed and have their product qualified by the Bluetooth SIG.

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