14 DAY TRIAL // By now, people who follow tech news will be familiar with the idea of wireless charging. It doesn't work at a distance, but it does allow you to place, say, a phone on a Wi-Fi charging pad and have it recover energy. Broadcom has just included that functionality in its Bluetooth chip.
The chip in question is called BCM20736 and is described as a Bluetooth Smart system-on-a-chip for wearable gadgets.
So you might find it in, say, Samsung's next Galaxy Gear, or Sony's Smartwatch 3. It's definitely small enough for such things. Alliance 4 Wireless Power (A4WP) standard is supported.
An ARM Cortex M3 drives it, complete with an integrated radio frequency and embedded Bluetooth Smart Stack.
Since the wearable market is just taking off and will reach 130 million by 2018, Broadcom has brought this thing out just in time.