New Qualcomm Technologies Target Wearables, Smartphones, IoT Devices

Qualcomm, which announced LG as a launch partner for the Snapdragon Wear platform last week (see 1602110034), said Wednesday that ODMs Borqs, Compal Electronics and Infomark have begun offering reference designs based on the Wear 2100 SoC (system on chip). Borqs is offering connected (3G/4G) and tethered (Wi-Fi/Bluetooth) smartwatch and kid watch reference designs based on Snapdragon Wear 2100, while Compal is delivering Wear 2100-based reference designs and device production supporting Android Wear and Android operating systems for connected and tethered use cases, Qualcomm said. Infomark’s Wear 2100 reference design targets kid and elderly watch segments, Qualcomm said. In smartphone solutions, Qualcomm bowed a suite of RF360 technologies for premium and entry-level design tiers. The RF360 antenna tuners and switches and a RF front-end allow OEMs to build “sleeker” phones with superior battery life, call reliability and quality, data speeds and network coverage, said Qualcomm. Meanwhile, Qualcomm said it’s the first company to support hardware-backed biometric fingerprint authentication for Tencent’s WeChat mobile payment service. With fingerprint authentication enabled by Qualcomm’s Haven security platform framework, users will be able to do secure online transactions on their mobile devices without PIN codes or passwords, said Qualcomm. The framework supports Tencent’s security authentication protocol fingerprint matching, processing, local storage and communication to Tencent servers in the cloud. The technology is shipping in the Vivo X6 device in China and will be available in “multiple smartphones” over the coming months, Qualcomm said. Qualcomm will demonstrate support for Tencent’s WeChat payment service on the Vivo X6 at Mobile World Congress (MWC) next week. Also at MWC, Qualcomm will demonstrate the Snapdragon X16 LTE modem capable of gigabit data transfer speeds, 4-layer MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output) in a smartphone and 5G connectivity, Qualcomm said. In a demo with Ericsson, Qualcomm will show 1-Gbps download speeds using a combination of 3x carrier aggregation, 4x4 MIMO on two aggregated carriers and high-order modulation using 256-QAM. Qualcomm will demonstrate with Sony 4x4 MIMO capability for the first time in a smartphone along with Ultra HD Voice, which it called the next generation of voice call quality. Two IoT demonstrations using low-power LTE with 4G connectivity will show how LTE-connected IoT devices can achieve longer battery life, Qualcomm said.