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John Hodgson
CAMBRIDGE SILICON RADIO
CEO
58, British-American
www.csr.com
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If Hodgson and his team get it right, we will soon be able to throw away our cables and forget our worries about not being able to synch our PC with our personal digital assistant.
Their start-up, Cambridge Silicon Radio, is now the global leader in chipsets used for Bluetooth, a technology that allows a whole range of devices to communicate wirelessly within a 10-m radius. The privately-held British company — which has raised $65 million in funding and does about 60% of its business in Japan — has already shipped more than a million Bluetooth single-chip devices, many of which are showing up in IBM, Sony, Compaq, Fujitsu and NEC laptops, Sony cell phones and Hewlett-Packard printers.
Hodgson boasts that 50% of the products on the Bluetooth industry’s global website have Cambridge Silicon Radio’s chips inside.
To be sure, market analysts have downgraded their forecasts for Bluetooth over the last year, due to the global economic slowdown as well as problems with device interoperability, interference from other radio technologies and fears over the security of the technology.
But analysts at Frost & Sullivan in London still believe Bluetooth has strong growth potential, forecasting that more than a billion Bluetooth-enabled devices will be shipped by 2006, generating $330 billion in revenues. If that prediction comes true, Cambridge Silicon Radio will really boom.
The Vision Thing: "I envision a world where people will not want to buy an electronic device that is not Bluetooth enabled."
Forward Spin: The company is way out in front in Bluetooth technology with a single-chip solution that offers smaller size as well as lower cost and power consumption by integrating the radio, base-band processor and software. But small players like California’s Transilica and Zeevo may be catching up, and big players like Texas Instruments have the resources to become major threats. Other challenges for CSR and the Bluetooth industry: reducing chip cost and ensuring that chips made by different manufacturers can operate with one another.
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