If you have not heard of California-based Ineda Systems, you’re probably not the only one but you may want to remember it going forward. Formed in 2010 by a group of semiconductor designers and engineers, the company focuses on processor solutions specifically for wearable technology. It today unveiled its Dhanush family of Wearable Processing Units or WPUs designed for wearables that include everything from fitness bands, smart watches and glasses to athletic video recorders and the Internet of Things.
Whereas most wearables currently offer a battery life that may last a few days at best, the Dhanush WPUs promise to run up to a month. According to Dasaradha Gude, CEO of Ineda Systems:
“The Dhanush family of WPUs offers better power consumption by an order of magnitude than smart phone processors that are currently being retrofitted for wearable devices.
The smart phone market grew substantially with the advent of smartphone-specific dedicated application processors. Dhanush WPU SoCs will enable a similar transformation in the wearable market segment.”
The Dhanush WPUs use Ineda’s own Hierarchical Computing architecture which “allows applications and tasks to run at the right power optimized performance and memory footprint and has an always-on sensor hub optimized for wearable devices.” Four products are available, each designed for specific applications and product segments:
- Dhanush Advanced: Designed to include all the features required in a high-end wearable device – rich graphic and user interface – along with the capability to run a mobile class operating system such as Android.
- Dhanush Optima: This is a subset of the Dhanush Advanced and retains all the same features except the capability of running a mobile class operating system. It offers enough compute and memory footprint required to run mid-range wearable devices.
- Dhanush Micro: Designed for use in low-end smartwatches that have increased compute and memory footprint. This contains a sensor hub CPU subsystem that takes care of the always-on functionality of wearable devices.
- Dhanush Nano: Designed for simple wearable devices that require microcontroller-class compute and memory footprint.
Ineda Systems also today announced that it has received US$17 million in funding from number of partners, including Samsung and Qualcomm (through their venture capital groups).
Dhanush is already sampling with tier-one customers. Volume production is expected to begin in the second half of the year.
Source : Ineda Systems