Gadgetory

hey this is Jake with the verge and we're here at CES day one I'm sitting down with Raj Hilary from Qualcomm he oversees their IOT and mobile computing division and we're gonna talk a lot about smart homes and smart cities so Qualcomm you had your press conference the other night and you can ounce chips are pretty much everything smart home smart phone smart city cars drones out of all those which is the biggest opportunity for Qualcomm right now we at Qualcomm we feel like the technology we've invested in in phones you know you know particularly all the connectivity technologies and the application processor technologies we are finding applicability for those technologies in many adjacent markets and you saw us talk about a few of them you know automotive and IOT and healthcare and so on we think that a lot of those markets are already quite big for us we actually ship a lot of products in the IOT you know ship I think we said in the press conference hundreds of millions of ships already into IOT market and so what the home a big area for us is adding connectivity to a lot of different things around the home so for example in China we sell a lot of connectivity technology you know Wi-Fi and processing into a lot of air conditioners for example has a lot of you know thermostats in air purifiers you know washing machines and a lot of white goods then we also sell connectivity into streaming speakers into connected TVs and that's into a big part of what you announce yes a whole reference platform for Smart Hub products it's best to scale across these different devices is that right right so so I mean if you step back and think about a smart home and think of the products in the home and what kind of technologies are mostly needed in that what we are finding is that firstly they need to have the ability to connect to the internet and that could be Wi-Fi you know you know to the access point and then to the internet they also need to have the ability to connect to other things in the house like a Smart Hub at your smartphone r2 r2 you know the other Lang lights would connect to maybe you know another control system at your security system and so on so what we're finding is in the home there's multiple connectivity technologies Wi-Fi Bluetooth ZigBee are the key ones right so how do you deal with the diversity of requirements with low power and high power and things that need you know just in LTE connection things that might need ZigBee your z-wave which it's my knowledge I don't think Malcolm makes chips for right so we haven't announced anything on TLC bill yet but what we find is that be Wi-Fi and LTE and Bluetooth are actually very big in the home and interoperating from one connectivity to the other so basically most of these connected homes devices in the future will have multiple forms of connectivity so it's probably connect to your phone over Bluetooth the access point over Wi-Fi and to maybe a ZigBee hub over our ZigBee so we think that multimode connectivity is very important and that's kind of one of the things we announce no difference platform is the ability to have multiple forms of connect to be supported in one chipset interesting so how do you decide what forms of connectivity to put in because some extent you're the gatekeeper if if ZigBee connectivity is built into our smartphones one day that's going to make that platform and all that smart home products much more accessible to everyone yeah I mean there's multiple ways to do it I mean it's not necessary to have ZigBee into the phone for example you know you could have I think that a lot of the endpoints in the home will actually have ZigBee and Wi-Fi or ZigBee and bluetooth and some things like that so - the connection to the phone maybe it's through bluetooth okay our Wi-Fi and from there it may be zip get the other one so that's why I don't think it's important to have all of them in the phone but it's important to have multiple forms in the endpoints not ships okay and so the other thing that you were out there talking about the press conference is your smart cities product I know you know it's a lot of low power processors things that we'll be able to sit idle right awhile at a time I you know have you gotten to the point where these processors or these chips can last on a very very low power for a long period of time because that's going to be one of the big hurdles right yeah so what we announced actually is our next-generation modem chipsets which and we announced a few family of them we announced abortions of them a few months ago at i/o a day we had in China if I step back a little bit if you think about smarts it is the connectivity in the smart cities is going to be different the way the use cases for example let's say you are you know you're like a you know water like a security system somewhere are you're like water metering system or so on what happens is most of the time you have sensors that collect the data and only once in a while you need to wake up and send some information back so you're not like on all the time like a phone right and the data that you need to send maybe just a little bursty data maybe small part of it not a lot so what we've done is build modems now that are able to last on just a you know double-a batteries for for over 10 years so what happens is you install these things they live in the field and you don't have to update them for 10 years but they're not on all the time they're just only on when needed and a narrowband IOT is a standard that's providing that so if the processors are here what are the hurdles still to adoption because obviously this is still an emerging yet field we don't see it everywhere ATT was talking yesterday about how its testing things in a few different cities but it's not widespread and doesn't seem like it's going to be widespread overnight well I mean I think it will happen and it'll happen pretty fast you know I think a couple of things you know one the business models need to get worked out and they are getting worked out like operatory the plans for IOT how does that look like and then also you know there's a lot of product out there and installations have to get replaced one by one but you see it happening fast already like if you update your security system now you got a new security system that connects and sends you messages and so on so the cycles happen to these products you will be getting things with a lot more connected bill do you see these smart city products like water meters and I guess you know traffic lights being part of the same Internet of Things that is part of our you know security systems and washing machines a smart phone these tie together one day exactly so the way we think about it is we think about what is the underlying technology for all of them so we look at the IOT as for example smart body which is all the variables you wear on the body smart home all the kind of connected things you have in the home and smart cities and all the things that go into the infrastructure the underlying technology you need for those is basically all the forms of connectivity from ltw to and processing at the edge because many times you need processing to happen at the endpoint and they can't just be you know sensors because otherwise you to go to the cloud and come back and the latency is too much so that we think underlying technology is going to be very similar the end equipment and the markets will be different so how does welcome to decide which specific products to target or your partners coming to you and saying these are the kind of things we need to make or are you trying to look down the road and see okay we want to be in healthcare we want to be in traffic lights yeah it's a very good question that's kind of what we do what I do in my job in product management is firstly the inputs we get are you know kind of all of the above first our customers tell us we want to do that then we also look at what's possible with existing technologies and what's possible with technology is a few years from now so many times when we innovate and push the technology forward then we present to the customers and say hey if we can do this what kind of products would you have so it's kind of a combination of both technology push and market pull gotcha well thanks so much for joining us Roger - great talking with you my pleasure thank you