Qualcomm claims wifi power breakthrough

The catchily named ‘QCC730 Wi-Fi solution’ claims to dramatically lower the power required for wifi modules. It has been unveiled at Embedded World and is positioned for use in IoT environments, as well as battery powered industrial, commercial and consumer applications. Fittingly, we’re probably talking about the most embedded environments here, since wifi will account for a small proportion of the energy use of, say, a smartphone.

“Complementing high-performance, low-latency wireless connectivity solutions, Qualcomm QCC730 SoC is an industry-leading micro-powered wifi solution enabling wifi for the world of battery powered IoT platforms,” said Rahul Patel, Group GM of connectivity, broadband and networking at Qualcomm. “QCC730 enables devices to support TCP/IP networking capabilities while remaining form-factor and complete wireless constrained, whilst remaining connected to the Cloud platforms.”

Qualcomm also unveiled the RB3 Gen 2 Platform at the event, a hardware and software processing solution for embedded applications. It’s built around the QCS6490 processor which, inevitably, is especially great for AI. It’s even supported by the recently announced Qualcomm AI Hub, which is a library of AI models for a variety of use-cases.

"We are excited to introduce the RB3 Gen 2 Platform, which is designed to bring advanced on-device AI capabilities to a wide range of mid-tier IoT applications,” said Jeff Torrance, GM of industrial and embedded IoT at Qualcomm. “Coming soon, we will be expanding our portfolio of IoT products to address high-performance, industrial grade solutions that will bring a new era of intelligence, functional safety, and robust high-performance compute and I/O capabilities to the most demanding industrial applications.”