The Week In Review: IoT

Deals
The $47 billion merger of Qualcomm and NXP Semiconductors will not only affect the automotive chip market; it should also have a significant impact in the Internet of Things business. The companies note they are together strong in microcontrollers, secure identification, mobile transactions, payment cards, transit, application processors, and connectivity systems. Meanwhile, NXP reported that its Hexiwear IoT and Wearables Platform received several awards at the ARM TechCon 2016 Innovation Challenge, including “Best Internet of Things (IoT) Product” and “Best in Show.” Denis Cabrol, director of global marketing for NXP’s microcontroller business line, said in a statement, “These awards further validate how the Hexiwear IoT and Wearables Development Platform enables developers to quickly and easily bring IoT and wearable products to life. At NXP, we are changing the way new product development is done for IoT applications.”

Security
Lights out! The Hue smart light bulbs marketed by Philips could easily be hacked, according to cybersecurity researchers who detailed the potential attack vector in a paper. The research team notified Philips ahead of making its findings public, and the company last month patched the vulnerability. One element in the flaw was the light bulb line’s use of the ZigBee radio protocol standard, which enabled the researchers to develop a computer worm that could spread among Internet-connected devices.

Technology
Image processing and computing will grow significantly in the coming years, according to Jem Davies, vice president of technology for ARM’s Imaging and Vision Group, speaking at last week’s ARM TechCon 2016 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. “We can capture and display great images,” he told a standing-room-only audience. “The next leap in computing will be in how we interpret images. That will be revolutionary.”

Products
Cadence Design Systems and MathWorks teamed up to join Cadence’s PSpice simulator with MATLAB and Simulink for streamlining system-level design and circuit-level implementation in mixed-signal automotive and Internet of Things applications.

Market Research
ABI Research reports that more companies are getting involved in Internet of Things partner programs, citing Dell and Intel as leading examples. “IoT partner programs are critical, as supplier diversity and offer complexity is not lessening and no one company can deliver a complete end-to-end IoT solution,” said Ryan Harbison of ABI Research, adding, “Over the past year, companies like Dell and Intel continued to grow their programs to target additional verticals like manufacturing and energy. IoT partner programs ‘un-fragment’ the market for end-users and drive awareness to hardware, software and service providers that combined can deliver an end-to-end IoT solution.” Details are available here.

IDTechEx Research has a new report, Internet of Things 2017-2027. The market research firm found that “very little IoT was deployed in 2016,” while it believes “a large market will eventually emerge but not primarily for nodes, where our price sensitivity analysis and experimentation shows commoditization rapidly arriving.”

QYResearchReports.com has published Global IoT Defence Market Research Report 2021, a 102-page study.