The Qualcomm Incorporated brand is being displayed at their pavilion in the course of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on February 28, 2024.
Joan Cros | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Qualcomm desires to get nearer to robotic makers.
The company mentioned Tuesday that it is buying Arduino, an electronics maker whose cheap programmable circuit boards and computer systems are frequent in hardware startups and robotics labs for prototyping.
Qualcomm did not announce a worth for the transaction, however mentioned the Italy-based company would turn out to be an unbiased subsidiary.
The deal provides Qualcomm direct entry to the tinkerers, hobbyists and firms on the lowest ranges of the robotics trade. Arduino merchandise cannot be used to construct business merchandise however, with chips preinstalled, they’re in style for testing out a brand new thought or proving an idea.
Qualcomm hopes that Arduino may help it acquire loyalty and legitimacy amongst startups and builders as robots and different gadgets more and more want extra highly effective chips for synthetic intelligence. When a few of these experiments turn out to be merchandise, Qualcomm desires to promote them its chips commercially.
“You start to move towards prototyping, proof of concepts, and once you’re ready, you can go commercial, which is something we are obviously very familiar with,” mentioned Nakul Duggal, Qualcomm’s normal supervisor for automotive, industrial, and embedded Internet of Things, or IoT, in an interview.
Qualcomm can be in search of to diversify its income away from a focus in cellular chips and modems because the smartphone market stalls and as Apple begins to maneuver to its personal modem chips.
Still, in the most recent quarter, Qualcomm’s IoT enterprise, which incorporates a lot of its present chips that can be utilized for industrial or robotics merchandise, and its automotive enterprise accounted for a mixed 30% of general income from chip gross sales.
To date, it has been troublesome for smaller builders to get entry to Qualcomm chips as a result of they sometimes get offered in giant portions to established enterprises. Rival Nvidia, nevertheless, has offered developer kits for its robot chips that may be instantly bought from retailers for as little as $249, and has mentioned that robotics is the company’s greatest progress alternative after AI.
Duggal mentioned Qualcomm bought two different corporations in the previous yr, Foundries.io and Edge Impulse, in an effort to turn out to be extra important to robotics builders. He added that Qualcomm hopes to finally assist energy humanoid robots, that are just like self-driving automobiles in how a lot AI computing energy they require.
Tuesday’s announcement mentioned Arduino will, for the primary time, launch a board with a Qualcomm chip. It’s known as the Uno Q and, priced at $45 to $55, comes geared up with a Qualcomm Dragonwing QRB2210 processor.
Qualcomm’s chip can run Linux, together with Arduino software program, and might even do pc imaginative and prescient, which deciphers what a digicam sees and interprets it into software program.
Current Arduino boards, which use lighter processors known as microcontrollers, aren’t highly effective sufficient to do numerous cutting-edge AI. Those boards use chips from corporations together with STMicroelectronics, Renesas Electronics, Microchip and NXP Semiconductors. Qualcomm will proceed to promote these chips by way of Arduino.
That’s a part of Qualcomm’s plan to not make any important adjustments to Arduino’s operations, administration or its developer neighborhood.
“My success criteria is that the Arduino ecosystem doesn’t even feel that there is any change in ownership here,” Duggal mentioned.
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