Since today’s announcement of the Sensor Platforms (SPI) acquisition might confuse or possibly concern investors who follow our company closely, I want to assure investors that we do not believe it will have a negative impact on our sensor hub CSSP initiatives, or change the roadmap we outlined during our April conference call. During that conference call we outlined our sensor hub strategy and platform roadmap, as well as our relationship with SPI.
Our Sensor Hub strategy leverages two business models – CSSPs and Catalog CSSPs. Within the Catalog CSSP product offering, our first algorithm partner was SPI. We’ve worked closely with SPI to refine and optimize their FreeMotion algorithms for use in both models, and have ported them to our core platform. With this partnership we have engaged numerous customers and applications with a turnkey catalog CSSP solution.
To support the CSSP business model, we announced the availability of our internally developed IDE that enables OEMs and algorithm companies to port their own software to our sensor hub. Potential customers have been working with this tool since the first IDE release.
In support of both business models, we begun staffing our own PhD algorithm team earlier this year, and continue to actively recruit to build this team. The goal of that team is to expand our sensor platform value proposition through internal development of software and algorithm solutions.
As we pointed out during our April conference call, our current and future sensor hub platforms are intentionally designed to be algorithm, sensor and processor agnostic. Since then we’ve brought up our sensor hub on a variety of applications processor platforms, have released our first internally developed context and gesture algorithms and qualified / optimized sensor families from the largest suppliers in the field. We look forward to providing more color on those and other developments in the near future.
This morning we announced a key addition to the QuickLogic executive advisory board. We are proud and excited that Steve Whalley is joining our advisory board. As Chief Strategy Office for the MEMS Industry Group (MIG), his broad ranging experience and knowledge should be invaluable as we rapidly expand our capabilities to address this exciting and rapidly growing market.
Andy – I guess QUIK investors were just exposed to a more competitive landscape than has been previously discussed in various blogs including this one and among Sell Side QUIK research providers. Perhaps now would be a good time to explain why QUIK’s Sensor Hub technology is superior to the Audience DSP-based product, which I see they aren’t actually calling a Sensor Hub while saying it does what a sensor hub is supposed to do. I am talking specifically about the MQ100 “Motion Processor”. Thank you. Obviously this is going to be a big market and there will be numerous competitors, but most QUIK investors are pretty much assuming QUIK will get some sort of “first mover” head start advantage in the market. Is that the plan from your perspective?
Hello, Brian Faith here.
Thanks the question! Without getting into too much of a detailed competitive analysis here, we promote our ArcticLink 3 S1 sensor hub platform based primarily on ultra-low-power consumption and design flexibility. We view this as the critical combination that is needed to enable the emerging market for always-on / context aware market.
Similar to the more common microcontroller based solutions that are in the market, based on the information listed at the Audience web site, their DSP-based solution consumes roughly 18 times more power than our ArcticLink 3 S1 solution (250µW in active mode).
Regarding flexibility, our hub is designed to accommodate QuickLogic-, 3rd party-, and/or OEM-developed algorithms. More simply stated, as Andy Pease noted in the above blog, the ArcticLink 3 S1 (as well as the next two platforms we described during our April conference call) are all processor, sensor and algorithm agnostic. Since it is not discussed in the information I’ve read, I don’t know how flexible the Audience device is in these three critical categories. Outside of power consumption and flexibility, I don’t see any specifications where the Audience device would seem to trump our S1.
Is there a ‘first mover’ advantage? We certainly think so. We believe we are the first company that has a solution in the market that enables the requirements for power consumption and flexibility that are needed to enable the emerging always-on / context aware sensor fusion market.
Brian – thanks very much for your comments. In addition to the ultra-low power and design flexibility characteristics of the Quicklogic Sensor Hub products, including algorithm agnostic-ness, how important is the programmable logic component and the ability to re-program on the fly to the your company’s competitive positioning in this emerging and potentially large market? Correct me if I am wrong, but I’m not aware of competitive offerings – either MCU-based or the Audience DSP-based products – that contain a programmable logic element.
You are correct that we are the only true sensor hub device on the market today with programmable fabric. We certainly do see fabric as a key selling point, but with the understanding that ultra-low power consumption and design flexibility are the critical combination.
Brian – Also, if the Audience MQ100 consumes 18x more power than the ArticLink 3 S1, how does that compare to the Articlink 3 S2, which is taping out now and will be commercially available in about six months if I recall Quicklogic’s most recent public comments on that from the last earnings call. Thanks very much!
We haven’t announced details of the S2 beyond what is shown in our investor presentation and mentioned in our Q1 2014 earnings call. At a high level, the S2 will expand upon our critical combination of power consumption and design flexibility. Stay tuned for more information!