There is more to in the IoT bandwagon for the semiconductor industry than filling up traditional hardware sockets – this has been one of my pet thinking cap topic for quite some time now. On these lines, an interesting news article that caught my attention a few days back was on Movidius extending its partnership with Google and extending the focus to neural network technology.
Movidius made news when Google used it’s vision SoC in its computer vision technology platform called Project Tango.
Companies like Movidius, Mobileye are extending the hardware reach beyond traditional scaling, features and applications spaces especially when jumping on the IoT bandwagon. They are not just focusing on getting more of the traditional sockets. They are finding novel ways to capture value on what they enable.
Robotics, Advanced Driving Assistance Systems, Augmented and Virtual Reality are some of the emerging technologies and applications holding large commercial potential. And computer vision is a key underlying technology enabler for them. Customize this for high quality and ultra low power embedded vision and you are well positioned for the mobile devices market in the IoT space
Movidius for example not just provides the core hardware in the form of VPU or Vision Processing Chip – a term it coined – but also provides along with a software development kit plus an algorithm library. And with its ultra low power is geared for mobile IoT devices.
Mobileye has a big share in the vision chip market for ADAS.
The point I am trying to iterate with these 2 companies is that there are more ways to ride the IoT wave in addition to filling the traditional (though increasing) sockets.
Keen to hear your views.
