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Certification/Qualification for Selling product

Hi all,

I want to sell a device that I have made that uses the nrf51822 and the app inside the chip is derived from the ble_app_uart. It uses two chips that communicate using a proprietary service.

What do I need to market it as an Bluetooth device? Do I need to qualify my proprietary service? Do I have to do the qualification and declaration steps from the SIG?

Or can I simply market it as an bluetooth product since it uses your chips?

Thank you for the help, Jorge Costa

  • Hi Jorge,

    If you just buy our chips it does not mean that your product is pre certified for RF and pre-qualified for Bluetooth.

    The qualification has to be split in 2, the RF compliance like FCC/ETSI/ARIB and the Bluetooth SIG part. We have a page on our infocenter with a lot of information about qualification of RF devices, read infocenter. For the RF compliance, this will depend on which area you plan to sell the parts as there are different regulations all around. On a general note the RF specialist on our side said the pricing for these tests are typically in the thousands of US$ range. How much exactly will depend on where you qualify and how many regions should be covered. This qualification can be omitted if you buy modules that are pre-qualified for the areas you are to sell the product into.

    For the Bluetooth SIG part, you can find a link to the listing costs with the Bluetooth SIG from the before mentioned webpage. The listing can be done with our QDID and will thus be a fixed cost of 4000 or 8000 US$ based on the customers Bluetooth SIG member level. It will also be necessary to perform a Bluetooth RF PHY qualification of the completed solution, this is a significantly smaller qualification than the full qualification but this has to be done at a BQTF certified entity. I do not have numbers on cost for this as it again will depend on the location where you do the tests. The PHY test can be omitted if you use a pre-certified module certified for Bluetooth, several of the modules with nRF devices are qualified in this way. You can also omit this qualification if the design is based on the same layout as a previous design as they can then be qualified by similarity.

  • i changed the title to reflect your question, hope you do not mind of that.

  • Thank you for the help. The hardware part is not being made by our company, so we are only offering the firmware to the nrf. From what I understood we only have to do the Bluetooth SIG part, I will try to read your infocenter to get more knowledge on this.

    I didn't fully understood what you mean by "omitted", do you mean I don't need to do it?

  • Yes Jorge, by omitted, i mean you do not have to do it. If you use module that are already certified, then you do NOT need to do the PHY test again. From your description it sounds like your company have to do the bluetooth SIG part and the RF part needs to be done by the other company (if they are not using pre-cerfified module with nRF chip inside) about your proprietary service, maybe this info from hung is helpful.

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