Broadcom Claims New Bluetooth Device Doesn't Charge for 10 Years

Broadcom claims that it has developed a new Bluetooth low energy chip. Broadcom claims that the battery life of Bluetooth keyboards can reach 10 years in the future.

Broadcom's chip model is the BCM20730, which is backward compatible with previous Bluetooth standards. This compatibility will likely increase chip power consumption. The Bluetooth 4.0 technology supported by the BCM20730 has so far only appeared on some mobile devices. The BCM20730 is said to increase battery performance by reducing the data transmission bandwidth.

The BCM20730 emulates a USB HID device. Broadcom claims that because of its ZeroTouch configuration technology, PC computers do not require any paired receiver devices.

Broadcom said that another benefit of Bluetooth 4.0 is that the latency from idle to active state is greatly reduced, which makes Bluetooth 4.0 peripherals have faster response performance than older Bluetooth devices.

In addition to the keyboard, Broadcom said the BCM20730 chip also supports 3D glasses, mice, game controllers, and any other type of wireless device controller. The BCM20730 even has an ARM Cortex M3 chip built-in, which does not require any additional processing by a third-party chip.