what’s is your point about it being a dollar per chip? that it’s implemented by super cheap labor or something?
silicon is free. you are paying for the r&d. that’s why volume matters. at the volume of bluetooth chips, they are almost indeed free. most of that dollar is distribution costs.
my point is, the cost of the chip isn’t a signal of anything except the ubiquity of it.
True. The likes of broadcom are hugely sophisticated and really really understand the spec.
But _none_ of your consumer level gadgets are made by broadcom.
Broadcom will sell millions of these cheap as chips chips to second tier players.
Who may sell on to third tier players.
Who buy or pull a bluetooth stack and sort of vaguely maybe know what they doing, tie it all together and get the BT compliance stamp (which sort of means it doesn't shit all over the RF spectrum and vaguely works)...
...and then the sell it to you.
ie. The chip manufacturer hopefully has clue.... then it gallops rapidly downhill from there.
All Bluetooth chips come with SDKs and depending on your solution another API in the OS of your board. At that point clients don't need to know much about bt and from my experience don't care beyond "how do I make these bytes appear on the other side".
BT is massive but that's mostly BT classic which is slowly going away as more and more chips are BLE only which is saner. That's why we're adding isochronous channels to keep it interesting.
silicon is free. you are paying for the r&d. that’s why volume matters. at the volume of bluetooth chips, they are almost indeed free. most of that dollar is distribution costs.
my point is, the cost of the chip isn’t a signal of anything except the ubiquity of it.