Qualcomm and Google are extending their collaboration on wearables by developing a Risc-V Snapdragon Wear platform that will power future Wear OS products.

Work has begun and will continue to ensure that applications and a robust software ecosystem for Risc-V will be available for commercial launches.

Qualcomm is building on its long-standing collaboration with Google by bringing a Risc-V based wearables platform for use with Google’s Wear OS. This expanded framework should help reduce time to market for OEMs when launching smartwatches with features such as custom cores, low power and higher performance.

Leading up to this, the companies will continue to invest in Snapdragon Wear platforms as the smartwatch silicon provider for the Wear OS ecosystem.

“Qualcomm has been a pillar of the Wear OS ecosystem, providing high performance, low power systems for many of our OEM partners,” said Bjorn Kilburn, general manager of Wear OS. “We are excited to extend our work with Qualcomm and bring a Risc-V wearables to market.”

Dino Bekis, vice president at Qualcomm, added: “We are excited to leverage Risc-V and expand our Snapdragon Wear platform as a leading silicon provider for Wear OS. Our Snapdragon Wear platform innovations will help the Wear OS ecosystem rapidly evolve and streamline new device launches.”

Both companies recently joined other companies to launch the Risc-V Software Ecosystem (Rise –riseproject.dev) and Qualcomm recently announced it was teaming up with Bosch, Infineon, Nordic Semiconductor and NXP to form a new company to advance Risc-V hardware development.

As an open-source instruction set architecture (ISA), Risc-V encourages innovation by allowing any company to develop completely custom cores. This allows more companies to enter the marketplace, which creates increased innovation and competition. Risc-V’s openness, flexibility and scalability benefits the entire value chain, from silicon vendors to OEMs, end devices and consumers. 

Qualcomm (www.qualcomm.com) plans to scale the technologies that launched the mobile revolution – including connectivity, low-power compute and on-device intelligence – to connected smart devices across industries.