Zeevo Unveils The First True Single Chip Bluetooth Product And Provides Complete System Soultions For Explosive Growth Market

TC2000 is The First to Integrate All RF, Analog, and Digital Functions on a Single Chip;Blue Shark Offers System Manufacturers Complete IC, Software, and Development; Zeevo's Chip Provides Advance Bluetooth Features With Industry's Smallest Footprint

LAS VEGAS, NV – March 20, 2001 – Zeevo, an emerging leader of System-on-a-Chip" (SoC) solutions for the communications market, today announced availability of the world's most highly integrated, single-chip Bluetooth solution, the TC2000. The world's first 0.18 CMOS single-chip Bluetooth product leapfrogs all other Bluetooth solutions in the marketplace today by melding the most cost effective and highly integrated process technology with the most complete Bluetooth SoC design and packaging.

Additionally, Zeevo combines the TC2000 with complete software and an end-to-end development system solution for developing Bluetooth applications, the TC2000/Blue Shark Development Kit. The TC2000 and inclusive development environment will ease development and implementation of Bluetooth applications and significantly improve time-to-market in the highly competitive Bluetooth applications industry.

Zeevo's TC2000 re-defines the oft-heard phrase, ‘single-chip solution'. The first to combine all of the RF input/output circuits, analog, and digital functionality into one low power, full-featured, small form-factor package, the TC2000 solution requires the fewest external components in the market today. Customers need only add a crystal, antenna, decoupling capacitors, a reference resistor, and a printed circuit board (PCB). The ‘digital looking' chip is just a portion of the total Zeevo solution.

To support system design and testing, the TC2000 is available as part of the Blue Shark Development Kit. Zeevo offers a complete development environment incorporating HCI-compatible firmware, lower and upper layer Bluetooth Protocol Stack Software, and all of the currently defined Bluetooth Profiles. Also available are development tools, reference designs, and full HW/SW customer support, making the TC2000 the market's only one-stop-shop solution.
"We are very pleased to be the first company that can support all of our customer's system design needs with a complete design environment that the market has been looking for," said Greg Ravenscroft, VP of Marketing for Zeevo. "The TC2000 is full-featured, meeting all Bluetooth form and function requirements. It has the smallest footprint in the marketplace, which is key to incorporating the TC2000 into handheld consumer electronics products like cellular phones and PDAs."
Ravenscroft adds, "We've developed the TC2000 from a systems perspective. For example, Zeevo customers will not have to bounce from hardware vendor to software vendor in order to resolve an issue because Zeevo integrates and tests all aspects of the TC2000 before it's delivered to the customer. All parts of the system work together seamlessly so customers can concentrate on their application development and not on debugging vendor's hardware and software. We are and will continue to be the one-stop-shopping solutions provider for broad-based communications needs."

"We are very pleased to be involved with Zeevo, an emerging communication company," said Hiep Pham, CEO and president of WIDCOMM Inc. "By using Zeevo's high-performance single-chip solution with WIDCOMM's industry leading protocol software, manufacturers will realize major size, cost, and time-to-market efficiencies for their Bluetooth products."

"As one of the most explosive new communications technologies, Bluetooth fits right into our roadmap of target markets," says Anil Aggarwal, President and CEO of Zeevo, Inc. "Our technology is scalable and re-usable and can be easily ported to other communications industry segments including WLAN (802.11 and Home RF) and WAN (3G/4G and OFDM) as well as selected wired segments. Zeevo is positioned to provide all of the key silicon required in most communications products and our core technology and precision execution is establishing the company as the consummate leader in the communications space."

According to Allied Business Intelligence (ABI), annual shipments of Bluetooth-enabled devices alone will reach 1.4 billion units in 2005 with projected sales in 2001 reaching 53 million units. Cahners In-Stat Group predicts that the Bluetooth market will approach US $5 billion by 2005 and 1.4 billion Bluetooth chips will ship that year.

The TC2000 Development Kit is available now for $8000. Samples of the TC2000, along with engineering samples, are now available; full production quantities will be available in 3Q01. The price for the TC2000P-4 is $17 for OEM quantities of 1-Millon plus.

Single-Chip Product Features
The TC2000 integrates all RF (Balun, switch, shield, impedance matching, and RF filters), radio, analog, memory, and digital circuitry into a single device with a footprint of approximately 10 mm by 12 mm. Zeevo offers full software support with the device.

Full Featured
The device is compliant to the current Bluetooth 1.1 specification. Along with built-in self-test diagnostic routines, the baseband supports point-point, point-multipoint, up to 7 slaves per piconet and up to 4 piconets for scatternet operation, master/slave switch, full Bluetooth data rates (723.2/57.6 Kbits/sec), and up to 128-bit encryption. Zeevo also provides a proprietary feature called "Turbo Mode" that can increase the effective data transmission rates of Bluetooth up to 2 to 4 times between two Zeevo enabled Bluetooth devices.

RF
The TC2000 radio has a completely integrated RF interface that connects to the antenna via a single pin interface so that customers can mount the TC2000 like a regular component giving it a "digital-looking" appearance. It provides up to 4 dBm transmit power for Class 2 and 3 operation and supports Class 1 operation with an external power amplifier interface. TC2000's high performance features include –80 dBm input sensitivity (measured at the antenna) and excellent noise tolerance. By incorporating Zeevo's RF expertise on-chip, the need for customer RF expertise on the production floor is eliminated.

CPU and Memory
The CPU section of the TC2000 is based on an ARM7TDMI and is supported with 64 Kbytes of on-chip RAM. Two versions of the chip are available, the TC2000P-4 with 4 Mbits of Flash memory and the TC2000M-E with an external memory bus interface. The TC2000 user interface includes USB version 1.1 (12 Mbits/sec), high speed UART (9600 – 921.6 Kbits/second), and 8 General Purpose I/O (GPIO).

Software
Fully supported by software, the TC2000 is provided with a standard Bluetooth HCI interface for USB and UART. A Bluetooth Protocol Stack (for L2CAP, RFCOMM, SDP, OBEX, and TCS), Bluetooth test tool, and all current Bluetooth Profiles as specified by the Bluetooth specification are available.

About Zeevo
Zeevo, Inc. is a privately owned fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, CA. The company was founded in 1999 to develop and market "system on a chip" (SoC) solutions for the communications marketplace. Zeevo's goal, Enabling Pervasive Connectivity, means staying connected anytime, anywhere in order to have a true "Personal Web" that can be carried with you at all times. Zeevo, a member of the Bluetooth SIG since January 2000, has been actively working on the development of Bluetooth technologies for more than a year. For more information, see our web site at www.zeevo.com.

About WIDCOMM
WIDCOMM, Inc. (short for "Wireless Internet and Data/Voice Communications") creates software and designs products for indoor wireless communications. Founded in June 1998, the privately held company focuses on Bluetooth networking. WIDCOMM's goal is to innovate affordable short-range radio technologies to connect users of handheld computers, phones, PCs and other network devices to one another and to the Internet. For more information, visit WIDCOMM's Web site at www.widcomm.com.

About Bluetooth
Bluetooth is a technology specification for the Bluetooth Special Interest Group which consists of leaders in the telecommunications and computing industries who are driving the development of an emerging open standard specifying wireless transmission between small form factor, low-cost, short-range radio-linked electronic devices. Bluetooth specifies a system platform including hardware, software and interoperability requirements. The Bluetooth radio operates in a globally available 2.4 GHz ISM band, enabling communication compatibility worldwide between a wide range of home, business, and general-purpose electronic systems. To learn more about Bluetooth qualification, visit the official SIG Bluetooth web site at http://qualweb.opengroup.org/

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BLUETOOTH is a trademark owned by Telefonaktiebolaget L M Ericsson, Sweden and licensed to Zeevo, Inc.
Zeevo and Enabling Pervasive Connectivity are owned by Zeevo, Inc. Santa Clara, CA, USA. and may be trademarked.
All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.