It's generally acknowledged these days that Bluetooth and Wi-Fi can live together in harmony as standards, but it's another matter to get them to work together while residing in the same device. Interference problems from collisions -- since both use the same radio frequency (RF) band -- causes dropped packets, which only cascades into other problems. However, Texas Instruments (TI) believes it has the answer.

The director of advanced technology in TI's WLAN Business Unit, Matthew Shoemake, says the company has been working on this problem for a while -- in fact, its solutions already built into the company's WANDA reference design for a PDA that would have Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cellular all in one Pocket PC.

The TI Bluetooth/802.11 coexistence package is specifically focused on makers of mobile devices like PDAs and handsets, as the problem of coexistence is magnified the closer together the chips for each are placed. The design criteria therefore was that that no RF radio isolation should be required. Instead, the chips use "time domain coordination," not RF isolation, to get simultaneous use.