Broadcom Makes Bluetooth Device Batteries Run for 10 years

If anything can put a dent in the appeal of a wireless peripheral, it is how they tend to run out of power at the worst moments, since it is always a bad moment when they are in use.

Broadcom means to make this problem go away through its latest invention.

What the company did was create a special Bluetooth chip that uses so little energy that a single battery charge will last for years.

In other words, Bluetooth keyboards (and a lot of other things too) will go on for a long, long time without having to be recharged, or getting their batteries changed.

Certainly, the maximum lifespan will depend on the quality of the batteries as well.

For those who want some numbers, Broadcom envisions a period of about ten years without the keyboard needing a recharge or battery change.

The BCM20730, as the chip is called, doesn't only do that either.

For one, it is one of the first items to use the Bluetooth 4.0 standard, the one that also promises better battery performance, even though the benefit comes at the price of transfer speed.

The 260 Kbps is not precisely impressive, and might not actually be enough, or ideal anyway, for a wireless keyboard.

On the flip side, Bluetooth 4.0 does possess a much lower latency from idle to active state.

Furthermore, the Broadcom BCM20730 is backwards compatible with other Bluetooth standards and emulates a USB HID device.

Finally, it boasts the ZeroTouch configuration technology and an ARM Cortex M3 SoC (system-on-chip) which handles the processing usually done by third-party chips in wireless devices.

In addition to keyboards, the solution will work with 3D glasses, wireless game controllers, mice and various other things.

Now we just have to wait and see if battery life concerns really do become a thing of the past. Hopefully, it won't take overmuch for a practical implementation to appear.