CSR recently announced its BlueCore silicon is now inside iPod compatible stereo headphones from three companies: iTech, WiGear and Airlogic. All three companies now use BlueCore for Bluetooth stereo headphones (and plug-in adaptors) that have been designed to work with Apple's iPod as well as other MP3 players.

Three other tier-one cellular OEMs, existing CSR customers, use BlueCore for stereo headsets designed for use with mobile phones. The Digital Signal Processing (DSP) architecture built into CSR's BlueCore technology means CSR offers the only Bluetooth silicon with native support for MP3. This results in better design functionality and up to twice the battery life.

CSR's DSP inside the BlueCore IC is highly optimized to run audio CODECs, including the basic SBC (Sub-Band CODEC). More importantly, CSR's DSP architecture has the processor throughput to support MP3, AAC and other proprietary CODECs, with power consumption figures low enough for battery-powered applications. According to CSR, competing solutions only offer support for SBC and consume twice as much power as CSR's 95 mW, making them unsuitable for such applications.

CSR claims that only Bluetooth headsets designed using CSR's BlueCore can wirelessly connect to a Bluetooth mobile phone and a music player simultaneously. When the user receives a phone call, the device will automatically mute the sound and connect to the mobile phone. At the end of the call, the original music connection will resume automatically. Only CSR's BlueCore can reliably support multiple simultaneous connections meaning that headsets designed using other silicon cannot successfully support this feature.

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