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AllJoyn your whitegoods, says Qualcomm

Stuff's worth a billion, says Thing-zilla

Qualcomm is giving its AllJoyn protocol another shove with new Internet of Stuff silicon targeting the home appliance market.

As well as integrating the Allseen Alliance AllJoyne framework, the company's QCA401x and QCA4531 chips put WiFi together with a microcontroller and various interfaces. The aim, the company says, is to get around the incompatibilities emerging in the Internet of Everything space.

The 401x has 800 KB of on-chip memory (this is the IoE world, where small footprints are a good thing), and as well as WiFi supports IPv6, HTTP, and connections for sensors, displays and actuators. Security features include anti-tampering, data integrity and root of trust, the company says.

The QCA4531 is a “feature rich IoE node” targeting appliance connectivity – the Internet of Whitegoods if you like. It includes embedded Linux and OpenWRT, a 2x2 MIMO 802.11n transceiver, and support for multiprotocol bridging. It can connect up to 16 devices and is power-optimised.

Allseen support is hardly a surprise, since the AllJoyn protocols underneath it are Qualcomm's baby.

In pitching the new stuff-chips to the industry late last week, there's also a hint at how what lies behind the growth of the market: practically anything that has silicon in it and communicates is now part of the Internet of Everything market.

Hence, Forbes reports, Qualcomm is now able to classify the IoE as a US$1 billion segment of its business, with chips going into “city infrastructure projects, home appliances, cars and wearables”.

Smartphones still dominate the Qualcomm business, but the company reckons 10 per cent of its chip revenues will come from “stuff” in 2015. ®

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