Thursday, October 1, 2015

UAVs will chip companies struggle into focus

Many chip companies, led by Qualcomm and Intel are secretly trying to drone right to dominate the emerging market for technology products.

Rapid expansion of global civil UAV industry attracted many enterprises and companies involved. Participants are divided into two categories, one is like big frontier, GoPro, manufacturing machine sold businesses; another is for UAVs provides upstream components, the manufacturer. Xinjiang machine factory with the dash, the upstream component suppliers receive less attention. But with the rapid growing UAV market, Qualcomm and Intel's name began to appear in the UAV-related news. Both companies released UAV used processor, Qualcomm has also invested in a new machine manufacturing enterprises. Chip giant added proof of chip technology in the future importance of UAV development should not be ignored, the chip will be the key to future UAV industry core components.

Traditional civilian drones do not require powerful computing power: by experienced operators within Visual distance using small, short-range radio control RC airplane takes a simple circuit normal flight. Until recently years, battery power more axis spin wing and airborne camera device of combined let novice also can fast learned no machine control, while also on no machine itself of electronic equipment capacity proposed has is high of requirements: aircraft and ground of communications bandwidth to sharply increased to transmission video data; best has obstacles detection and avoid capacity to make up control who experience of insufficient; no confidential and other electronic equipment is good to collaboration, convenient control and achieved various uses, and so on. Meet the needs of new, unmanned aerial vehicles require strong processing power and communications capability. Traditional MCU has been embarrassing task, civilian drones began as military drones equipped with powerful chips. Swarovski iPad Mini Case

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But for the drone development processor is not a simple job, not just to a Core i5 platform tucked into the fuselage alone will solve the problem. Flight task type does not need to be addressed, and many tasks are not PC or mobile tablet using the CPU, GPU excels. Like drones around the image information, GPU texture units and grating in almost no use for object recognition, dedicated FPGA circuit efficiency can be much stronger than that of a four-core I7 CPU. Chip companies need for UAV development dedicated processor, rather than simply general design changes.

Drone communication components are also very important. Mobile phone communication not very sensitive to delays, but aircraft accepted instruction if half a second late may have serious consequences. Necessary to maintain low latency and high bandwidth, unmanned aerial vehicle using wireless data chip cannot directly with mobile phone baseband numbers also requires a special design and optimization.

In addition, use battery-powered aircraft for airborne electronic equipment power strictly limited, energy-intensive chip will directly affect the range. Super-Mini unmanned aerial vehicles not to use too much control chip, the constraints of chip area may be stronger than a smart phone. In short, develop chip for this new thing is bound to be a challenge. Swarovski iPad Mini Case

But behind the tough task, unmanned chip's potential market is very attractive: vehicle body usually does not damage quickly, using longer; but the core electronic devices will be replaced quickly, every year or two there will be a newer, more powerful chips available, enhance the ability of drones. Drone replacement module will like to upgrade PC components as usual, which means great business opportunities. A drone that cost $ 1000 install module may sell for $ 300, equivalent to the price of a PC CPU. Future UAV industry worth tens of billions of dollars in the chip business can have $ 10 billion or more of the cake. In addition due to the drone of many technologies connected with the driverless cars, chip technology developed for the former can easily become the latter's heritage. If no computer chips get the lead, then can the self-driving cars of the more important industry has become a key player. Even for Qualcomm and Intel, the chip giant which is unable to resist the temptation, it's no wonder the Giants have started, ready to show.

At present, unmanned chip just released by the two companies test products, is still based on mobile phone chips to modify, rather than specialized research and development. You can expect they will soon come up with real for the market development of processors and baseband core and begin to develop airborne control bus, the module interface standard. Future users in the purchase of should also care about the use of drones was what level of CPU, and results in the special test procedure; "refuses to run a" scope to expand. The good news is, once the core processing module becomes a standard component, users only need to upgrade the drones die can get more performance and more features, saving the costs of purchasing the machine. Fast iterative chip technology also makes the drone more ease of use, safety, you can complete additional tasks, costs are lower. Just like the rapid development of chip technology to significantly accelerate the PC as with the popularity of smart phones, penetration rate of UAVs in civilian areas will also benefit from this. Past only the military might be like in the future will be equipped with unmanned vehicles widely available, this is the beauty of IT.

1711 votes

Microsoft Surface 3

New atom performance ARM processors have and top closer, but are worse and the mainstream core of the series by a mile, but taking into account the thermal power of 14W and 2W gap, which is understandable. Use it for routine minor Office enough and finally surface series can also run X86 program! Said performance flaw, is that it does not use the SSD, and broken eggs eMMC 4.5, which even with the eMMc 5.0 modern Android flagship.

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