Indian Startup Uses Imagination for Wearable SoC

Looks the startup has all it takes to survive ,be focussed and become profitable. Hyderabad in india also has good soc designers and very cost effective manpower. But indians in top management of a startup has positive and not so positive effedcts when it comes to mergers,acquisitions and partnership models. But let's hope industry has something thoughtful and innovative in future. Good luck.

Cool crew trying to leap to the next big thing. Sorry I could not make the Sili Valley event where they made a debut!

I'm really curious to see what they put out. It seems like after years and years of wearable devices being the "next big thing", we might be seeing a drastic rise. Then again, our cell phones are filling the niche that many expected from wearables.

The approach that has been standard for a few years now is to either write an application that can be hosted on the smartphone OR, if additional hardware is required, put it in a separate unit that links to the mobile phone via Bluetooth.

In this way new applications can piggyback off the reasonable chance that users will have a phone with Bluetooth that can connect you back to the Internet.

The downside is that the wearable product (various counters and meters for medical, sports, wellness) must rely on the ability of users to turn on and use the Bluetooth attributes of their phone....and it may require a separate piece of software on the phone to collate data and upload.

By the time you have split and complicated your product this way you can turn off a lot of consumers.

What this product may address is the desirabiity to have the wearable satellite equipment as power-efficient as possible so that charging it can be kept to a minimum or may even allow energy harvesting from movement.

Imagination Technology is used more often it seems....what is their advantage over ARM?

PowerVR the market leader in licensible graphics cores is probably more expensive than Mali graphics. Cortex-series, the leader in licensible CPU cores, is proably more expensive than MIPS cores.

You pays your money, weighs up the support infrastructures, the roadmaps and long-term prospects and makes your choice.

@Caleb: I agree. I wroyte about wearbales a deacde ago...but at some point the someday tech becomes a today tech.

I'm watching for the Galaxy Gear news tomorrow. I am told Samsung is packing GPS, cmaera and more into a watch. We shall see.

ARM CPUs would have been a better choice, considering the eco system.

"What this product may address is the desirabiity to have the wearable satellite equipment as power-efficient as possible so that charging it can be kept to a minimum or may even allow energy harvesting from movement."

Even then you might need to connect the device to the cloud to accumulate the data.. ie still needs a bluetooth/wifi connection?

@eewiz

What we don't know is how much Ineda is paying to use MIPS, or is being paid to use MIPS?

If Imagination is willing to cut a great deal to get you to use MIPS and be a poster boy/girl for ultra low power maybe it is the way to go. Especially if you think the real power saving is going to come in the rest of the circuit and how you write the sofware.

@eewiz

Also Imagintation/MIPS will probably give you great support while ARM is very busy and may even have been slow in getting in to pitch their cores to Ineda.

Certainly Sanjay Jha and Lip Bu-Tan know ARM well. 

As a happy owner of a FitBit, it seems that wearable technology is getting closer to reality - although I do wonder about implantables....

I know plenty of diabetics that would kill for a simple implanted blood tester.

Now that Sanjay Jha is CEO of GlobalFoundries, Ineda has an inside track there, it seems.

Much as i like the concept of a platform for wearable computing, the significant power consumption on the wireless side is still a challenge. Bio-inspired, analogue circuit designs are probably the only way for Healthcare applications. Similarly, other applications should do lot more power efficient designs that are specific to that application. A platform approach would reach its limitation soon....not difficult for the ARMs of the world to catch up...