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Qualcomm Demonstrates Performance In Wearables And IoT

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Qualcomm

On Monday, Qualcomm announced a new platform for smartwatches dubbed the Snapdragon Wear 3100. Qualcomm first introduced the Snapdragon Wear platform with the Snapdragon Wear 2100 in early 2016 and followed by a series of other products aimed at anything from smart trackers to premium watches. While the market for wearables has been slowly developing compared to the catastrophic growth rate of smartphones, it is still growing, and Qualcomm has become the leader in Android-based smartwatches and other devices.

The new platform combines four Arm Cortex-A7 processor cores with a DSP and a new real-time operating system (RTOS) Co-Processor in a big-little-tiny combination. The new RTOS co-processor, the QCC1100, combines and Arm Cortex-M0, the lowest power ARM microcontroller (MCU) core, with a Power Management Unit (PMU) and memory as a standalone solution. By pushing most of the active functions to the RTOS co-processor and letting it disperse workloads to the other processing cores, Qualcomm has reduced the active power consumption by 20x over a smartphone-based applications processor. The 3100 also features upgrades in the RF front-end, NFC functionality, and now support for dual-displays. The result is more performance and functionality with longer battery life.

Qualcomm

Qualcomm

Smartwatches are part of the much-overhyped consumer Internet of Things (IoT) that was going to be the next billions of consumer devices. However, it has proven challenging for two reasons. First, the electronics industry has pushed many consumers away from watches with smartphones, especially millennials. Second, most people that wear watches consider them a fashion accessory, which means everyone has very individualistic tastes. And unfortunately, engineers are not good at designing fashionable devices as we have seen time and time again. In addition, fashion trends change frequently.

However, the smartwatch category is very important to the industry. Because of its size and power constraints, the smartwatch is an ideal innovation platform for anything that is a fraction of the size of a smartphone and is likely to be worn or carried. This includes everything from clothes to medical devices. Additionally, the smartwatch or other wearables are likely to be key in the evolution of the smartphone, which TRIAS Research believes with be the disaggregation of the phone into many other devices including smartwatches, smart glasses and other wearable electronics that interact with the other electronic platforms around a person, such as the smart home, smart car, or smart office. As a result, it forces companies to think differently about the entire platform design. It becomes more about where to put the processing, intelligence, sensors, storage, and applications than trying to cram everything into a single package.

Additionally, just as the smartphone technology has proliferated to just about every area of consumer and industrial electronics, so too will the wearables technology. While the integration and performance of a smartphone will garner a higher price and margin than a smart tracker or smartwatch, the total volume of applications is likely to be 10 to 100 times larger. The number of microcontrollers (MCUs), the small limited performance computing devices that control everything from a toy to a motor, already outnumber traditional processors and systems-on-chips (SoCs). And yes, the smartwatch market will be in the hundreds of millions or more annually, eventually, but the market will be highly fragmented as it is for other fashion products.

As with the smartphone, the companies that innovate around wearables will be industry leaders. While Qualcomm is not alone in this segment, the company is a leader in wireless connectivity, various processing solutions ranging from Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) to Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and traditional Central Processing Units (CPUs), and mobile intelligence. The company also continues to invest in other technology and reference design platforms to build out its Intellectual Property (IP) portfolio for IoT applications while some of its competitors like Intel have abandoned this segment.

While I have been less than amazed by the smartwatch category thus far, the level of performance and functionality is starting to change my view and the usage models of consumers in general. This along with future business models aimed at wearables will drive a new inflection point in the electronics industry and stronger growth.

The author and members of the TIRIAS Research staff do not hold equity positions in any of the companies mentioned. TIRIAS Research tracks and consults for companies throughout the electronics ecosystem from semiconductors to systems and sensors to the cloud. Members of the TIRIAS Research team have consulted for Intel and Qualcomm.

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