Among the flurry of announcements this week from the Bluetooth Developer Conference in San Jose, Calif., was one from Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR) that Audi will start selling a car equipped with its BlueCore silicon technology.

The German company will be the first to offer cars with Bluetooth-enabled GSM car phones and cordless handsets. The technology will allow drivers to carry on cellular conversations through the car's stereo system. Vehicles will be rolled out in countries supporting the GSM network in Europe and Asia beginning this month.

Bluetooth will become more prevalent in cars in the next four or five years, said Eric Janson, CSR's vice president of worldwide marketing. Industry research firm Allied Business Intelligence forecasts 19 percent of all vehicles will be equipped with Bluetooth by 2007.

The initial thrust is for hands-free calling, Jansen said, but down the road, other applications might include car keys with Bluetooth chips that save seat position preferences and radio settings for different drivers.

CSR also announced that they have developed the BlueCore2-CDMA, a single chip radio that is compatible with the Qualcomm CDMA MSM series chipset. Jansen said the radio will make it easy to add Bluetooth to CDMA handsets.

Finally, the Cambridge, England-based company said that, together with Intersil, it has developed a reference design for a mini-PCI card combining Bluetooth and 802.11b wireless protocols. In addition, Smart Modular Technologies, the design arm of Solectron, is producing samples of the card, which are expected to be available next month.