Texas Instruments today announced that the company's fifth generation Bluetooth solution has passed the qualification for Bluetooth specification v2.0 and enhanced data rate (EDR) by the Bluetooth SIG. TI's solution delivers the fastest version of enhanced data rate (EDR) to support speeds up to 3Mbps in a Bluetooth network for bandwidth intensive applications on 2.5G and 3G mobile phones, including faster downloads of MP3 files and digital photos.

TI also introduced the BlueLink platform name for its lineup of complete Bluetooth hardware and software solutions for mobile phones. The first solution in the family is BlueLink 5.0, which consists of the BRF6300 single-chip Bluetooth solution designed for easy coexistence with TI's mobile WLAN solutions and software for Bluetooth operation. The software includes TI's BlueLink Bluetooth Protocol Stack and all software required to work with TI's OMAPTM platform and GSM, GPRS, EDGE, WCDMA and UMTS chipsets. The BlueLink 5.0 solution qualified for Bluetooth specification v2.0 + EDR and is now sampling.

To speed manufacturers' time to market for Bluetooth enabled 2G, 2.5G and 3G mobile phones, the BlueLink 5.0 single chip uses TI's 90 nanometer (nm) advanced process manufacturing and DRP technology.