From Home-Made to Tailor-Made: R&D Support for Sourcing Bluetooth Silicon Components
Martin Botteck, Research Manager Validation and Testing Technologies Nokia GmbH
Abstract
Sourcing departments often are confronted with the task to make rather complex components available within the product design process. Bluetooth baseband components are an interesting example of such a component since they not only constitute a major cost point in the product´s bill of material but also come with a rather complex set of requirements: Regulatory approval of the component, hardware characteristics like size, pinout, number of external components, RF performance and mechanical dimensions are probably already obvious areas of interest that sourcing departments have to deal with ordinarily. For Bluetooth, we also have to consider a substantial amount of software embedded inside the component that has to be evaluated and studied. Highly automated software verification systems play a significant role in this evaluation. The sourcing project also includes some experience of migration from such components already being developed in-house. The presentation will outline the project concept, its main obstacles and lessons learnt. It will not elaborate on the technology details but instead give an overview about the complexity of such sourcing project, its runtime and volume.
