BCM4325

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Revision as of 12:32, 14 July 2009 by Rusmac (talk | contribs)
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This chip is in the iPod2,1 (iPod touch 2G) and iPhone3,1 (iPhone 3GS) and combines Bluetooth/Wifi and a secret FM radio, presumably connected and ready to go on a future firmware release by Apple.

FM Radio

The most peculiar thing is the inclusion of an FM radio. There is a product brief available from broadcom on this chip: {put link here} but it serves little purpose apart from the block diagram and interface hardware/software.

Interfacing the FM radio is done in two stages: Control via the bluetooth modules's UART or I2C and digital audio streaming over the module's I2S/PCM hardware.

most notably: the FM radio never physically leaves the sillicon die, except for the antenna (which may be connected directly to the BT/UMTS/everything else [:P lol] antenna) this means that the control/streaming will be an extension to the BT protocols currently implemented.

For control, the HCI over UART (/dev/uart.bluetooth) seems the most logical solution to turn the radio on/tune/search etc. but the vendor specific HCI commands will need to be *obtained* (or reversed, which could prove hard). A broadcom datasheet would have this information, but unfortunately you have to sign an NDA to obtain one.

For streaming, the i2s bus sounds good... interfacing this could be hard but playing on the stereo bluetooth profile of iphone OS 3 we could piggy back, at least to start with. however we do need the radio ON first...