Steve Mollenkopf, the CEO of Qualcomm, gave one of the keynotes at the Consumer Electronics Show recently. Of course Qualcomm is historically a huge fabless semiconductor company that sells mostly into the mobile market with chips under the Snapdragon name. But Qualcomm is in the process of acquiring NXP which is a very different company, an old-school analog company with a number of specialist fabs. NXP (which recently acquired Freescale) is the #1 company in automotive, so when the acquisition closes, Qualcomm will inherit that crown. Automotive semiconductors are changing from old-school analog to the type of high-performance advanced SoCs that Qualcomm is so experienced designing. It will be interesting to see whether everything comes together cleanly, NXP's relationships with the automotive manufacturers (and the so-called Tier-1s) and Qualcomm (and Freescale's) experience at SoC design and signal processing. The big thing in mobile is the next generation of radio technology, with much higher bandwidth and lower latency (as low as 1ms), known as 5G. Speed and responsiveness will create new opportunities. In a report that Qualcomm had commissioned on the 5G economy, there are predictions that 5G will have the same type of impact as the introduction of electricity, creating 22M jobs worldwide and a $12T market in retail, education, transportation and entertainment. It is coming quite fast, with trials just announced, starting this year, involving Qualcomm, AT&T, Ericsson and SK Telecom. The standards will need to last for a long time. For example, the 4G standards were defined long before anyone had a smartphone. Now, over half of all phones are smartphones. In fact between 2016 and 2020, 8.3B smartphones should ship (that's 50 per second for years). Immersive Experience One area that will improve is streaming video. Video has become really important, representing 55% of traffic in 2015 and forecast to rise to 75% by 2020. Experiences such as virtual and augmented reality will help, and not just for entertainment but with critical work functions, customer service and training. Steve used his keynote to announce the latest member of the Snapdragon family, the 835. It is the first 10nm mobile processor (build in Samsung's technology). Lots of the stuff you would expect: 25% less power, dual camera, optical zoom, build-in security (eye-based authentication). Basically it will give a fiber like experience to a wireless connection. Devices using the chip will be available in the first half of the year. There is mm wave technology for wireless too, allowing speeds up to 4.6 Gbps. Dave Cole, the CEO of NextVR came and talked about their platform for immersive experience and the ability to, for example, move around the basket ball court. I'm still not convinced I care. The performance is high, currently 60 frames per second and will go up to 120 fps with 5G. Connecting Everything By 2020 there should be 20B IoT devices connected giving smart cities, smart homes, smart bodies (health). Funnily enough, at CES, IoT was not a phrase that was ubiquitous. I think that is because once the things are selling, they are smart watches, or autonomous drones, or water bottles that measure your hydration or whatever. It is only in the semiconductor industry that we use the IoT word. One big area ripe for taking more advantage of the power of computing is healthcare. Qualcomm have a life platform and are expecting a lot of the internet of medical things. One forecast is that 40% of IoT technology will be tied to healthcare by 2020. Mission Critical Services Unlike Mythbusters, where failure was always an option, there really are mission critical services where failure is not an option. One area is intelligent drones integrated with the existing aviation infrastructure. The next 5 years will see 25M consumer drones shipping. Qualcomm and working out of the San Diego FAA-approved flight center with AT&T to help develop drone regulations and 5G specifications. There was a neat example of the latest drone technology, which weights just 12 grams. There is machine learning and streaming video built in. The drones are autonomous, discovering their environment as they go. There are no offline computers up in the cloud doing the heavy lifting. The drones were just using machine vision to keep track of where they are, not GPS. Soon drones like the ones demoed will be patrolling warehouses, doing search and rescue and more. Autonomous vehicles are the most obvious area for failure-is-not-an-option needs. In the US, 38,000 people died in 2015 but the target is to reduce that to 0 as every car becomes a connected sensor. Qualcomm (not including NXP) has been the #1 supplier of automotive connectivity for years. Cars will get more online services. Volkswagen, for example, already have 2.1M vehicles that are "always on." But new architectures are required with a focus on upgradeability, updateability and security. Vehicle to vehicle and to infrastructure (V2X) today uses line of sight technology, but that will need to work in bad weather, and around corners. Qualcomm are working with Ericsson and Audi in a new program in Germany. The umbrella organization for all of these is the 5G Automotive Association (of which Qualcomm is a founding member). Clearly the complexity and quality levels are hugely different from 10 years ago. What Happens Online in 1 Minute Steve wrapped up with a list of what happens online every minute: 72 hours of video are uploaded 100,000 friend requests 4 million searches 200 million emails 14 million text messages 24,000 hours of conversation Mobile has truly become the center of our lives. Previous: xxxxx![]()
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