The Qualcomm Incorporated logo is being displayed at their pavilion during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on February 28, 2024.
Joan Cros | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Qualcomm wants to get closer to robot makers.
The company said Tuesday that it’s acquiring Arduino, an electronics maker whose inexpensive programmable circuit boards and computers are common in hardware startups and robotics labs for prototyping.
Qualcomm didn’t announce a price for the transaction, but said the Italy-based company would become an independent subsidiary.
The deal gives Qualcomm direct access to the tinkerers, hobbyists and companies at the lowest levels of the robotics industry. Arduino products can’t be used to build commercial products but, with chips preinstalled, they’re popular for testing out a new idea or proving a concept.
Qualcomm hopes that Arduino can help it gain loyalty and legitimacy among startups and builders as robots and other devices increasingly need more powerful chips for artificial intelligence. When some of those experiments become products, Qualcomm wants to sell them its chips commercially.
“You start to move towards prototyping, proof of concepts, and once you’re ready, you can go commercial, which is something we are obviously very familiar with,” said Nakul Duggal, Qualcomm’s general manager for automotive, industrial, and embedded Internet of Things, or IoT, in an interview.
Qualcomm is also seeking to diversify its revenue away from a concentration in mobile chips and modems as the smartphone market stalls and as Apple starts to move to its own modem chips.
Still, in the most recent quarter, Qualcomm’s IoT business, which includes many of its current chips that can be used for industrial or robotics products, and its automotive business accounted for a combined 30% of overall revenue from chip sales.
To date, it’s been difficult for smaller developers to get access to Qualcomm chips because they typically get sold in large quantities to established enterprises. Rival Nvidia, however, has sold developer kits for its robot chips that can be directly purchased from retailers for as little as $249, and has said that robotics is the company’s biggest growth opportunity after AI.
Duggal said Qualcomm purchased two other companies in the past year, Foundries.io and Edge Impulse, in an effort to become more essential to robotics developers. He added that Qualcomm hopes to eventually help power humanoid robots, which are similar to self-driving cars in how much AI computing power they require.
Tuesday’s announcement said Arduino will, for the first time, release a board with a Qualcomm chip. It’s called the Uno Q and, priced at $45 to $55, comes equipped with a Qualcomm Dragonwing QRB2210 processor.
Qualcomm’s chip can run Linux, along with Arduino software, and can even do computer vision, which deciphers what a camera sees and translates it into software.
Current Arduino boards, which use lighter processors called microcontrollers, aren’t powerful enough to do a lot of cutting-edge AI. Those boards use chips from companies including STMicroelectronics, Renesas Electronics, Microchip and NXP Semiconductors. Qualcomm will continue to sell those chips through Arduino.
That’s part of Qualcomm’s plan to not make any significant changes to Arduino’s operations, management or its developer community.
“My success criteria is that the Arduino ecosystem doesn’t even feel that there is any change in ownership here,” Duggal said.
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