Major Bluetooth Manufacturers
The first Bluetooth headset designed by Ericsson for Nokia was made by Lucent Technologies in 2002. Lucent merged with Alcatel in 2006, and then Alcatel-Lucent officially joined Nokia in 2016. Since Lucent’s first headset, manufacturers all over the world have incorporated Bluetooth into their designs, or based their businesses entirely around Bluetooth. Sony, Philips, Samsung, Apple—all of these companies are major presences in the Bluetooth landscape. Bluetooth chipsets are generally manufactured by semiconductor companies, and once qualified/certified, incorporated into modules or end-products by the major technology vendors.
That very first Ericsson headset was manufactured by VLSI Technologies, which in turn was bought by Phillips in 1999 and then became a part of the Phillips spinoff, NXP Semiconductors.
Other large manufacturers are:
- Texas Instruments
- Cypress Semiconductor
- Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR)
- Nordic Semiconductor
- STMicroelectronics
- Dialog Semiconductor
Broadcom, Mediatek and pretty much every other RF module manufacturer has Bluetooth products to offer. Apart from the nine SIG Promoter companies, the member registry lists thousands of organizations at the Associate or Adopter levels. This is not counting the sub-component manufacturers, multi-million-dollar, publicly traded multinationals like IDT, Xilinx and Microchip Technology, all of whom produce microcontrollers, RF modules, transceivers and other sub-components that are integral to the design of other companies’ solutions.
