Broadcom mulls home-net play with Bluetooth acquisition

Broadcom mulls home-net play with Bluetooth acquisition
MONTE CARLO, Monaco — With its planned $440 million acquisition of Innovent Systems Inc., a chip startup that builds RF CMOS Bluetooth transceivers, Broadcom Corp. is making a serious bid to become a leader in the wireless market.

The deal will bring Broadcom not only design wins from customers in the Bluetooth wireless market, but will also provide an opportunity for the company to drive a hybrid home-networking architecture.

Broadcom already owns a cable modem solution that uses HomePNA technology, and could apply Innovent's Bluetooth technology to the backbone of a HomePNA-based home network. "Bluetooth, designed for point-to-point communication, can add portability and mobility to the home network, allowing consumers in a living room to use a Web tablet that's wirelessly connected to a cable modem, for example," said Brian Hyde, senior manager of marketing and business development at the Wireless Business Unit of Broadcom (Irvine, Calif.).

Among the numerous existing wireless technologies, Bluetooth was at "the top of the list" for Broadcom, Hyde said. "It is a worldwide specification gaining momentum, and everyone wants it."

Asked to explain Broadcom's interest in purchasing his company, William Colleran, president and chief executive officer of Innovent (El Segundo, Calif.), said, "The Bluetooth market we are going after is huge." For Innovent, teaming up with Broadcom will "accelerate the sales, marketing and production of our technology by a year," Colleran said.

Senior analyst Navin Sabharwal of Allied Business Intelligence predicted at the Bluetooth Congress here that 700 million units of Bluetooth-enabled products will comprise a $3.7 billion market by 2005.

Broadcom's agreement with Innovent is its second acquisition of a company with Bluetooth technology in the last few weeks .

In a $250 million stock deal signed in late May, Broadcom purchased Pivotal Technologies Corp. (Pasadena, Calif.), a fabless chip company known for its DVI intellectual property and scalable Bluetooth solutions based on its own RF CMOS technology.

With the combination of Broadcom's internal team of mixed-signal engineers, plus the RF experts acquired with Innovent and Pivotal, "We will have a very powerful team of 200 RF and mixed-signal technology experts," said Broadcom's Hyde.

It is not yet clear how the separate Bluetooth product plans, technology road maps and personnel from Pivotal and Innovent will be merged under Broadcom's roof. However, Hyde said that Broadcom bought Pivotal mainly for its DVI technology. Pivotal's Bluetooth engineers — which is not part of the company's DVI team — will most likely to be folded under Innovent's wireless team, according to Innovent's Colleran.

The fact that Innovent and Pivotal both use RF CMOS technology will create synergy with Broadcom's mixed-signal expertise, Hyde said.

Today, Pivotal has a "technology demonstration" of a single-chip 0.18-micron CMOS Bluetooth solution that combines RF and broadband features. Just came back from a foundry, the chip must still go through test and qualification, said Gordon Burk, formerly of Pivotal and now director of marketing for the RF and Advanced Mixed-Signal Business Unit of Broadcom. "It could be sampling in August," he said.

Meanwhile, Innovent's first Bluetooth product, the NVT1003, is sampling today. The part, which is being manufactured in an older 0.35-micron RF CMOS process, has already received design-wins, which Innovent declined to name.

Innovent also has a test silicon for an RF transceiver produced in a 0.18-micron CMOS process, slated for sampling early next year, according to Colleran.

Besides its single-chip RF transceiver, Innovent is preparing to make its NVT5001 standalone digital baseband processor available in September, and its NVT2001 combination RF and baseband single-chip device with full Bluetooth functionality available in the fourth quarter. Rather than blindly integrating the entire baseband into the RF portion, "We've opted for a modular approach," said Colleran. "We understand that different applications demand different partitioning between Bluetooth processing, microcontroller and peripheral interface." The baseband processor, now implemented in an FPGA, can be quickly turned into an ASIC or ASSP for use in cellular handsets, handheld computers and consumer electronics applications, Colleran said.