Qualcomm Rounds Out IoT Offerings At CES 2016

By Patrick Moorhead , Jan. 20, 2016 – 

Lots of chip companies like Arm Holdings , Intel INTC +0.00%, NVIDIA NVDA +0.58% and Qualcomm QCOM -2.22%are spending time and effort to find a place for themselves in the IoT market because they, like I, believe in a gigantic, future market. Some companies are focusing on wearables and drones while others are looking to automotive and smart home. Qualcomm previously spent a lot of their effort on repurposing smartphone chipsets for IoT purposes, which in the short term made sense, but in the long term wasn't really sustainable. Qualcomm saw this challenge and I believe has addressed it with a multitude of new technologies that address almost every major IoT segment. This is partially because Qualcomm is a big enough company, like Intel, that they can focus on multiple verticals at the same time and actually grow businesses out of them. At CES 2016, Qualcomm showed off the products they have designed purpose-built for IoT. These products include a smart home reference platform, an automotive grade Snapdragon 820A, an LTE modem optimized for IoT and a Bluetooth smart SoC for IoT. They also made some announcements around Wi-Fi connectivity and self-organizing networks, which still somewhat ties into IoT.

Smart home reference platform

Qualcomm's smart home reference platform is based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 212 processor which is more specifically designed to provide all of the things necessary to help someone, like Nest, Ring, or Canary build a smart home device or light hub. This reference platform is designed to allow virtually all of the 'smart' devices in the home to communicate with one another and to enable a single, easily manageable point of control. As stated earlier, it runs a Snapdragon 212 processor which has a 1.3 GHz quad-core Arm7 processor and Adreno 304 GPU. These specs alone are enough to allow for some decent media capabilities as well as processing things like audio, voice, and video all at the same time. It also has built-in wireless connectivity with 802.11a/b/g/n as well as Bluetooth 4.1, Bluetooth LE and NFC. These specs make it quite clear that this platform isn't designed for the high-end and that its purpose is to satisfy the needs of the soon-to-be-mainstream smart home market. What is interesting, however, is the added support for a display and 8 MP camera, which allows smart home hub designers to run with their designs and integrate displays and cameras into their hubs if they wan

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