GCT Semiconductor's Bluetooth Chipset Drives the World's First Commercially Available Wireless Speaker by LG Electronics
June 19, 2003 - San Jose, CA - GCT Semiconductor, Inc., a leading provider of radio frequency (RF) integrated circuits (IC's) for wireless devices, today announced that LG Electronics (LGE) has selected GCT's Bluetooth-enabling chipset to drive the wireless functionality of its home theater system.
In offering consumers a grand entertainment experience, LGE's home theater system's rear speakers, which support Dolby version 5.1 and are designed to be free of cable constraints, empower consumers with many different placement and positioning options, as well as an aesthetically pleasing setup. Further, the world's first commercially available Bluetooth-adopted wireless home speakers deliver excellent performance and high quality sound.
GCT's Bluetooth chipset consists of the GDM1002 RF Transceiver, and GDM1202 Integrated Baseband Controller with integrated high performance Digital Signal Processor (DSP) and several peripheral interfaces. Both devices are fabricated on Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) processes and collectively provide designers of streaming audio applications with an integrated and powerful solution to enable Bluetooth functionality. GCT's evaluation kit and complete protocol stack allow developers to create their own products with ease.
In developing the solution, GCT's designers enhanced the potential that is offered by the Bluetooth version 1.1 standard. Specifically, they overcame the sound quality limitations from the data bandwidth insufficiency of Bluetooth by developing a proprietary digital audio compressing with audio-centric DSP, which is integrated into the baseband IC. Also, in order to minimize the inherent delay of sound from source to sink owing to digital audio compression and wireless transmission, GCT's engineering team also integrated both sophisticated mixed audio coding and buffer control into the solution, which produces a low latency acceptable to rear speaker. As a result, GCT's solution achieves good audio quality without any problem owing to the audio delay.
The GDM1202 can also work peacefully in an environment that is crowded with either wireless local area networks (LAN)'s or other devices utilizing the 2.4 GHz ISM band such as microwave oven that is very popular and has strong interference in the homes. Through its proprietary adaptive frequency hopping, real time data rate control, and sophisticated error correction , the GDM1202 can continue to deliver high quality audio streaming without any discontinuity in environments where other Bluetooth systems would suffer a degradation in performance due to either interference or noise.
"We are very delighted to be chosen by LG Electronics, a world leader in consumer electronics, to be included in their home theater system with wireless speakers," commented Dr. Kyeongho Lee, President and CEO of GCT Semiconductor. "Design wins like this demonstrate how the performance and level of integration of our Bluetooth solutions gives the multimedia equipment world valuable and measurable benefits for consumers."
About GCT Semiconductor, Inc.
GCT Semiconductor is a leading fabless semiconductor company that produces innovative integrated circuit solutions for the wireless communications industry. With its proven radio frequency (RF) CMOS and system-on-a-chip (SOC) expertise, GCT provides state-of-the-art single-chip CMOS RF transceivers, mobile digital TV receivers and Mobile WiMAX solutions serving 3G and 4G mobile system manufacturers by reducing BOM cost, lowering power consumption and minimizing total solution size. For more information, please visit www.gctsemi.com.