When I took over as President & CEO of QuickLogic in January of 2011, one of the first things I did was to put more emphasis on our roadmaps and R&D investment.  I felt at the time, and still do, that R&D investment is the lifeblood of any technology company.   As part of this investment, I formalized our Office of the CTO, headed by Dr. Tim Saxe.  Tim’s charter was advanced R&D, specifically looking at mobile trends and how QuickLogic’s crown jewels – our low power programmable logic – can be leveraged to enhance the end user experience.

One of areas of interest we focused in on was sensors.  One doesn’t need to look very far to see that sensors are a market primed for high growth.  Through our research with OEMs, sensor algorithm experts and SoC providers, we believe that we have found a specific advantage in this market.  As Tim will speak to in a subsequent blog, our ultra-low programmable logic architecture enables QuickLogic to provide an application solution that is extremely power-efficient, while providing all of the processing and interface requirements OEMs require to enable today’s (and tomorrow’s) always-on sensor applications.  The key metric for always-on use of sensors in smartphones is to do so at less than 2% system battery life.  And we believe we are the first company to enable that.

The launch of our Sensor Hub Initiative is the confluence of many developments we have kept under wraps until this week.

• We announced a new silicon platform in ArcticLink 3 S1 – the first of its kind that contains patent-pending technology and tools for OEMs and sensor algorithm developers to achieve always-on context awareness at roughly 300 microWatts of power – a fraction of what is available today.
• We have begun cultivating an ecosystem of partners that bring expertise and highly differentiated and valuable sensor algorithmic IP.  The first of these partners, Sensor Platforms Inc, are well known and respected in the industry, and undoubtedly the premier partner to launch with.
• To expedite adoption of this new platform, we have also created an Always-On Context Aware Sensor Hub Catalog CSSP.  This solution is ready to adopt out-of-the-box and can enable some pretty exciting features for mobile device software developers.   This Catalog CSSP is the vehicle for Sensor Platforms’ context change detector – an integral piece to enable context awareness.
• And of course, all of this was possible because we have developed and commercialized an entirely new underlying programmable logic technology – one that is reprogrammable and yet still very low power.

I hope you are as excited as we are about how these new developments will change the way sensors are used in mobile devices.  I look forward to the success of our ArcticLink 3 S1 product line, and to many continued years of success at QuickLogic.