The Qualcomm Incorporated logo is on display at the Pavilion at the Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona, Spain on February 28, 2024.
Joan Cross | nuphoto | Getty Images
Qualcomm I want to get closer to the robot maker.
The company said Tuesday it was acquiring Arduino, an electronics manufacturer where cheap programmable circuit boards and computers are common in hardware startups and robot labs for prototypes.
Qualcomm did not announce the price of the transaction, but said the Italian-based company will become an independent subsidiary.
The agreement gives Qualcomm the best access to the lowest level tinkers, enthusiasts and businesses in the robotics industry. Arduino products cannot be used to build commercially available products, but the chips are pre-installed and are popular for testing new ideas and proving concepts.
Qualcomm hopes that it will help Arduino gain loyalty and legitimacy among startups and builders as robots and other devices increasingly need more powerful chips for artificial intelligence. Once some of these experiments become products, Qualcomm wants to sell them commercially chips.
“You start moving towards prototyping, a proof of concept. When you’re ready, this is clearly something we know very well,” says Nakul Duggal, general manager of automobiles, industry, the embedded Internet of Things, or the embedded Internet of IoT, or IoT.
Qualcomm is also trying to diversify revenue from a concentration of mobile chips and modems as the smartphone market is stalling. apple You start moving to your own modem chip.
Still, the most recent quarter includes Qualcomm’s IoT business, which includes many of the current chips that can be used for industrial or robotics products, whose automotive business accounts for a total of 30% of its overall revenue from chip sales.
Until now, it has been difficult for small developers to access Qualcomm chips. Because they are usually sold in large quantities to established companies. rival nvidiaHowever, it sells developer kits for robotic chips that can be purchased directly from retailers for $249, and says that robotics is the company’s biggest growth opportunity since AI.
According to Duggal, Qualcomm has purchased Foundries.io and Edge Impulse over the past year to become more important to robotics developers. He added that Qualcomm would ultimately like to support Power Humanoid Robots. This is similar to AI computing power, similar to self-driving cars.
According to a announcement on Tuesday, Arduino released its board with Qualcomm chip for the first time. Called the UNO Q, it costs between $45 and $55 and is equipped with a Qualcomm DragonWing QRB2210 processor.
Qualcomm’s chips can even run Linux along with Arduino software and perform computer vision that deciphers what the camera sees and converts it into software.
Today’s Arduino boards, which use lighter processors called microcontrollers, are not as powerful as doing many cutting-edge AI. These boards use chips from companies such as Stmicroelectronics, Renesas Electronics, Microchip, and NXP Semiconductors. Qualcomm will continue to sell these chips through Arduino.
This is part of Qualcomm’s plan to not make any major changes to the operation, management, or the developer community of Arduino.
“My standard of success is that the Arduino ecosystem doesn’t even feel there’s a change in ownership here,” Duggal said.
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