At Embedded World in Germany, Qualcomm announced its intention to acquire Edge Impulse to enhance its capabilities for developers and cement its position in IoT AI solutions.
The deal – subject to standard closing conditions – will complement Qualcomm’s approach to IoT transformation, which encompasses a broad spectrum of chipsets, software, services, and developer resources.
Nakul Duggal, Group GM for Automotive, Industrial and Embedded IoT, and Cloud Computing at Qualcomm, said: “We are thrilled about the opportunity to significantly enhance our IoT offerings with Edge Impulse’s advanced AI-powered end-to-end platform that will complement our strategic approach to IoT transformation.
“We anticipate that this acquisition will strengthen our leadership in AI and developer enablement, enhancing our ability to provide comprehensive technology for critical sectors such as retail, security, energy and utilities, supply chain management, and asset management.”
The increasing adoption of AI in IoT solutions is driven by its ability to automate workflows through rapid data collection, AI-powered analysis, and improved decision-making. This allows businesses to achieve greater operational efficiency and flexibility. Qualcomm aims to capitalise on this trend by leveraging its established leadership in industrial transformation through IoT and edge AI technologies.
“IoT opens the door for a myriad of opportunities, and success is about building real-world solutions, enabling developers and enterprises with AI capabilities to extract intelligence from data, and providing them with the tools to build the applications and services that will power the digital transformation of industries,” explains Duggal.
Over the past year, Qualcomm has refined its strategy to cater to the diverse needs of various IoT segments, offering integrated solutions that combine hardware, software, and services. These solutions are designed to scale across multiple verticals, including consumer, security, healthcare, retail, energy, and enterprise.
Qualcomm sets out its approach to IoT as comprising of:
- Chipset roadmap: Qualcomm’s bread and butter, with tailored application processors and connectivity chips to meet diverse industry and device requirements.
- Unified software architecture: Software designed for consistency and efficiency across platforms, reducing development and maintenance costs while enhancing security.
- Suite of services: Cloud services and software-as-a-service capabilities to facilitate commercialisation and expand industrial and embedded application capabilities.
- Developer resources: Hardware and software development kits to support IoT developers.
- Ecosystem partners: A network of distributors, independent hardware and software vendors, design centres, system integrators, ODMs, and OEMs.
- Solutions: Purpose-built offerings developed in collaboration with industrial and enterprise customers, utilising Qualcomm’s technologies and engineering expertise.
- IoT blueprints: Curated technologies, ecosystem partners, and solutions to address diverse industry needs.
Edge Impulse’s end-to-end edge AI platform empowers over 170,000 developers to create, deploy, and monitor AI models on a wide range of edge devices. The platform supports various microcontrollers and processors with AI accelerators from multiple semiconductor providers. Its toolset covers data collection, model training, deployment, and monitoring, all within an interface that requires minimal coding.
Developers can use Edge Impulse’s platform to build solutions for applications such as asset tracking, manufacturing, anomaly detection, and predictive maintenance, utilising computer vision, time-series data, audio events, and speech recognition.
Qualcomm anticipates enabling Edge Impulse platform developers to target Qualcomm Dragonwing processors, which feature powerful on-device AI inferencing, computer vision, graphics, and processing capabilities. Integration with Qualcomm AI Hub will enhance AI model optimisation for its platforms, which Qualcomm says will result in up to a 4x increase in inference performance and reduced model size and memory footprint.
Edge Impulse currently supports Dragonwing QCS6490 and QCS5430 processors, with plans to add support for additional Dragonwing processors for industrial and embedded IoT applications. Edge Impulse will maintain its existing website, now branded as “Edge Impulse, a Qualcomm company,” and will continue to support developers and ecosystem partners.
See also: Ericsson, T-Mobile, and Qualcomm trial XR on 5G SA network
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