Qualcomm plans to collaborate with ecosystem partners to drive innovation in IoT products and expand its portfolio of IoT products.
Qualcomm is making big strides in the rapidly evolving IoT and edge computing market announcing two new product launches — QCC730 Wi-Fi system for IoT connectivity and RB3 Gen2 development kit, tailored for IoT and embedded applications.
The Wi-Fi Solution can be used as an alternative to Bluetooth IoT applications with direct cloud connectivity. It is ideal for battery-powered industrial, commercial, and consumer applications and is supported by an open-source IDE and SDK for cloud connectivity offloading, facilitating ease of development.
The RB3 Gen2 development kit can be deployed in various products including robots, drones, industrial handheld devices, connected cameras, AI edge boxes, and intelligent displays. It comes with a development board, based on the Qualcomm QCS6490 processor, offering increased performance compared to the previous generation. Gen 1 ran on Linux and robot operating system (ROS) on an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 845.
The Gen 2 board supports optimized AI models lowering memory utilisation and includes a vision kit with additional components such as mounting bracket, high-resolution and low-resolution CSI camera for vision-based applications. It comes with a System-On-Module chip for IoT development, along with other accessories such as mini speakers, setup guide, pick tool for setting switches, etc.
In addition to this, the company also announced the acquisition of foundries.io, an edge-computing solutions provider, to improve its open source expertise and accelerate product commercialisation with Qualcomm Linux.
The company did not divulge any details on the acquisition of foundries.io. The acquisition however aligns with the idea that Qualcomm is trying to streamline the development and production process for semiconductor-based IoT and edge devices, creating an end-to-end solution for customers.
Qualcomm Technologies aims to continue collaborating with ecosystem partners to drive innovation in IoT products and plans to expand the portfolio of IoT products to address high-performance, industrial-grade solutions, bringing intelligence, functional safety, and robust compute capabilities to demanding industrial applications.
