Poor radio designs will quickly lose favor in public comparisons and customer experience. As Bluetooth gains acceptance in the market, we expect to see many more embedded Bluetooth designs. Next-generation EDA tools, such as the CoCentric product family and the SystemC modeling language, will dominate the market as consumers demand excellence. Superior radio performance raises the bar designers must jump to create commercially successful products. Technical standards specify minimum performance requirements, but to win, systems must be designed to exceed those minimum standards.
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That's especially true in the Bluetooth application because the unlicensed 2.4-GHz industrial, scientific and medical frequency band on which Bluetooth rides is already crowded and is expected to get even more so. It makes sense to start with a fast simulation of a generic Bluetooth transmitter, receiver and typical indoor propagation-channel models to meet the basic radio performance. Just as specs are evolving, so too are system-level design tools. Synopsys' Cossap, for example, is now being eclipsed by the company's CoCentric System Studio product. CoCentric System Studio can import all existing Cossap designs without modification and, furthermore, the designer can also take advantage of crucial new capabilities such as nestable control-flow modeling.