One of the biggest challenges facing today and tomorrow’s product manufacturers is the demands of the Internet of Things on their business. Before ‘IoT’, there was a clear(er) line between what was analog and what was digital. As the cloud economy booms, software development continues to thrive, and electronics get smaller and smaller, we continue towards a future where everything from your toothbrush to your car tires, are becoming connected. This new reality is forcing traditional product companies to go beyond creating a website or online customer service portal for their customers. This new change is demanding brands of all size, understand more about the three things that enable IoT products; hardware, software, and connectivity.
Over the next month, we will be covering these three areas in depth, starting first, with the top IoT chip manufacturing companies that are enabling today’s generation of ‘smart’ products for the home and business.
Texas Instruments
Stock Ticker: TXN
Market Cap: 44.48B
Primary IoT Offerings: Processors and microcontrollers, connectivity technologies, sensors, analog and digital ICs.
IoT Target Verticals: Wearables, Manufacturing, Building Automation Healthcare Smart Cities, Automotive.
IoT Tagline: Connect More.
Texas Instruments (TI) offers a broad portfolio of microcontrollers, processors, sensors and wireless connectivity technologies that allow business organizations to develop IoT applications specific to their unique requirements. TI wireless connectivity products cover over 14 digital communication standards for stringent compliance, productivity and innovation requirements of next-generation industries. Extensive network partnership with cloud vendors further enable business customers to complement IoT-enabled services. TI IoT building blocks include front-end nodes such as power management, analog signal chain and advanced sensing technologies generating precise data, hybrid gateways or bridges for IoT data transmission and a vast cloud infrastructure offering third-party IoT cloud services.
The rich blend of connectivity and processing solutions are primarily developed to serve advanced IoT requirements in organizations facing compliance challenges, industrial automation requirements, and productivity needs.
More info on IoT offerings: http://www.ti.com/ww/en/internet_of_things/iot-products.html
At the heart of every Internet of Things (IoT) system, microscopic transistors process millions of discrete computing steps almost instantaneously. These semiconductor devices drive the plethora of IoT advancements for business organizations to transform operations, automate mundane processes, establish insightful decision-making capabilities and ultimately yield unprecedented new revenue streams. Global chip manufacturers continue to lead breakthrough innovation in IoT chip manufacturing, fabricating twice as many transistors every 18 months as per the prevalent Moore’s Law. The best among top IoT chip manufacturers include:
Intel
Stock Ticker: INTC
Market Cap: 115.41B
Primary IoT Offerings: Processors, cloud infrastructure, and analytics solutions.
IoT Target Verticals: Automotive, energy, retail, industrial, healthcare, building automation, IoT Vendors.
IoT Tagline: Intelligent Systems.
Intel is at the heart of the IoT revolution with decades of industry-proven experience in manufacturing advanced processing technologies for businesses and consumers following the rapid pace of Moore’s Law.
Intel offers end-to-end IoT solutions connecting smart sensors and devices across the cloud infrastructure and instigating automated machine operations. The Intel IoT platform provides a foundation for third-party applications to connect and perform tailored IoT functionality in a secure environment specific to unique customer requirements. Intel processing chips capture sensor data, verify and transmit raw information to the cloud database yielding actionable insights using advanced Intel analytics capabilities.
Vast developer support and an endless range of semiconductor products make Intel one of the top IoT chip manufacturing companies in the world for organizations investing in customized IoT systems.
More info on IoT offerings: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/internet-of-things/overview.html
Qualcomm
Stock Ticker: QCOM
Market Cap: 124.26B
Primary IoT Offerings: Processors, networking, and IoT software.
IoT Target Verticals: Automotive, Education, Healthcare, Smart Cities, Consumer, IoT Vendors.
IoT Tagline: Internet of Everything.
As a global leader in mobile processor and connectivity technologies, Qualcomm delivers off-the-shelf IoT products for a range of industry verticals. The company is inclined toward consumer-oriented IoT applications with initiatives such as smart home and smart cities. Qualcomm IoT products allow consumers to transform the existing home network and power infrastructure into a connectivity hub for mobility-based IoT use-cases.
Qualcomm products for automotive, mobile, healthcare and education allow organizations from these verticals to develop consumer-facing IoT applications. Notable products include the Snapdragon processor powering over a billion mobile devices globally, wireless connectivity systems and advanced software IoT applications that allow business organizations to empower their customers with next-generation IoT capabilities.
More info on IoT offerings: https://www.qualcomm.com/products/internet-of-everything
ARM
Stock Ticker: ARMH
Market Cap: 22.07B
Primary IoT Offerings: Processors and microcontrollers, sensors, networking technologies, cloud infrastructure.
IoT Target Verticals: IoT Vendors.
IoT Tagline: The Architecture of the Digital World
ARM operates on a distinct business model of creating and licensing its technologies as intellectual property to third-party IoT vendors. Licensees of ARM processors for IoT applications range from consumer technology giants Apple and Samsung, to enterprise technology vendors IBM, Qualcomm and Intel, among others.
ARM IoT offerings range from sensors and processing chips to networking equipment and cloud servers establishing an end-to-end IoT hardware infrastructure. The company also provides development platforms such as the ARM mbed solution for third-party IoT vendors and business organizations to create IoT applications based on ARM microcontrollers.
More info on IoT offerings: http://www.arm.com/markets/internet-of-things-iot.php
Atmel
Stock Ticker: ATML
Market Cap: 3.16B
Primary IoT Offerings: Microcontrollers, memory products, custom ICs and wireless technologies.
IoT Target Verticals: Automotive, Smart Energy, Consumer, IoT Vendors.
IoT Tagline: Atmel and Internet of Things.
Atmel is leading the “Industrial Internet” movement with advanced logic memory components, microcontrollers, and capacitive touch solutions. Atmel IoT offerings are geared toward consumer, industrial, communications and automotive verticals. Atmel adopts the ARM Cortex for its processor technologies.
The current generation of Atmel microcontrollers extends the industry-proven Atmel 8051 microcontroller architecture for next-generation IoT use cases. The extensive portfolio of Atmel microcontrollers is designed for pin-to-pin compatibility with end-of-lifecycle legacy 8051 devices still working effectively across a range of IoT and automation applications.
Atmel also develops other devices constituting the front-end of IoT systems including sensors, wireless solutions, touch screens and wearable gadgets, among others.
More info on IoT offerings: http://www.atmel.com/applications/iot/default.aspx
Freescale
Stock Ticker: FSL
Market Cap: 4.28B
Primary IoT Offerings: Microcontrollers, memory products, custom ICs and wireless technologies.
IoT Target Verticals: Automotive, Consumer, Industrial, Healthcare, Energy, IoT Vendors.
IoT Tagline: Connected Intelligence.
Freescale IoT solutions include embedded processors, microcontrollers and multi-faceted sensors used in industrial, healthcare, automotive, smart energy as well as consumer applications. The company refers to its Internet of Tomorrow philosophy as an advancement of IoT in terms of highly connected and secure end-nodes within enterprise-wide cloud networks.
Freescale’s off-the-shelf IoT applications are primarily aimed at automotive, healthcare and smart energy industries. The company also adopts ARM processors for IoT vendors and business organizations to develop custom IoT systems. These systems are complemented with Freescale Sensor Data Analytics capabilities guiding insightful decisions from the data generated by Freescale sensors and the wider IoT infrastructure.
More info on IoT offerings: http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/homepage.jsp?code=IOT-INTERNET-OF-THINGS&nodeId=0229AB
While this list does not encompass the full spectrum of chip makers currently in the IoT space, it highlights some of the key IoT chip manufacturing companies. Stay tuned next week as we continue to explore the three fundamental areas of IoT, this time focusing on the radio modules that are enabling connectivity between devices.
