All Bluetooth® products must be qualified, and qualification must happen before you take your product to market. This is to ensure interoperability and reinforce the strength of the Bluetooth brand and its ecosystem for benefit of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (Bluetooth SIG) members and their consumers.
However, not all Bluetooth products have to go through the full gambit of expensive testing of the Bluetooth stack. The Bluetooth SIG allows its members to leverage the testing performed by other members as building blocks for their own Bluetooth products. Using another member organization’s previously qualified Bluetooth End Product or Subsystem in your product with no changes or additions to the Bluetooth design may require no testing at all.
When designing a product that will sell in low to medium volume, up to about 100K units/year, you should use a pre-certified USB module to avoid the cost and time of testing to be certified to meet Bluetooth standards.
When designing a product that will sell in high volume, particularly over 1 million units/year, you will save money by using uncertified chips and doing your own testing. It would be best to consider the extra time for testing. So often, a product is introduced with a certified module, and later a new design with uncertified chips is introduced.
You can also purchase an existing Bluetooth product manufactured by a third party and distribute it with your organization’s name or logo (also referred to as “white-labeling“) with zero required testing. Or, you can create combinations involving only previously qualified Bluetooth End Products or Subsystems as long as you make no design changes that require further testing.
And, once qualified in your company name via the Bluetooth SIG’s website, you receive the license grant forever. Here are the Bluetooth Patent & Copyright License Agreement and the Bluetooth Trademark License Agreement for what you qualify.
You can get help from recognized experts in Bluetooth Qualification. The Bluetooth SIG recognizes Bluetooth Qualification Consultants (BQCs) who help you navigate through the process, saving you thousands on future qualifications.
Authored by Michael Kirwan, a USA-based Bluetooth Qualification Consultant and Continua Certified Expert in Telehealth and Remote Patient Monitoring, mkirwan@dsheet.com, 913-207-8226.
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Voler Systems is a leading firmware design, electronics, software, and sensor development company in Silicon Valley. The company has built a solid reputation for reliable and innovative designs that meet the needs of modern businesses. With expertise in circuits, automation, motion control, and medical devices, Voler Systems is a leading provider of the underlying technologies for wearable devices, home health products, and industrial devices and applications.