THE CURRENT fad for mobile phone makers to turn their handsets into Ipod-like music players has created a lip-sync problem for Bluetooth wireless headset manufacturers.

Bluetooth chip specialist, CSR, says standard Bluetooth headset offerings have a latency of up to 200 ms which restricts their use in real-time applications such as gaming, video or mobile TV.

The drawback is that the audio feed lags behind the video image giving rise to poor lip-sync.

So CSR has come up with what it claims is the world’s first ROM-based Bluetooth chip with an integrated DSP. It uses ROM to aid product differentiation.

The aim with the Bluetunes ROM is to help with designing a wireless headset that's suitable for both voice calls and listening to music videos. And switches between the two easily.

On the music side, Bluetunes incorporates CSR's Faststream low latency codec while on the voice side it utilises both CSR's Clear Voice Capture and Acoustic Echo Canceller technologies.

The result should be a Bluetooth headset capable of ten hours of music playback from a 180 mAh battery.

In an effort to make life even easier for headset developers, not only does the Bluetunes ROM come with CSR's SDK, it also comes with a development board; reference designs; plus an audio adaptor and a Music Voice dongle

Bluetunes ROM silicon and development kits are sampling immediately and the chip should start shipping in December 2008. µ