At this week’s CES in Las Vegas, Qualcomm announced its expanded IoT portfolio, including more Dragonwing Q-series processors, complemented by services and developer offerings.

These have been fuelled by the acquisitions of Augentix, Arduino, Edge Impulse, FocusAI and Foundries.io in the past 18 months.

Qualcomm says it is now positioned to address the needs of a much wider spectrum of IoT users ranging from global enterprises to independent local developers, with the vision to become the provider of choice for core edge compute and AI technology across all industrial and embedded verticals.

“At Qualcomm, we’re not just introducing new products, we’re launching a comprehensive new approach to help organisations of virtually all sizes, across virtually all verticals, reap the benefits of AI and edge compute in their pursuit for efficiency and new opportunities,” said Nakul Duggal, executive vice president at Qualcomm. “Our expanded industrial and embedded IoT portfolio, combined with a robust developer ecosystem, positions us as the ultimate platform for building intelligent, connected businesses that scale.”

Through an expanded portfolio of processors, software, services and developer tools, the company offers options for rapid prototyping, scalable deployment and AI integration at the edge. This transformation introduces distinct product lines with a unified software architecture supporting Linux, Windows and Android.

By integrating Arduino and enhancing developer accessibility through Edge Impulse and Foundries.io, Qualcomm is empowering developer communities to innovate faster and more securely. This unified ecosystem merges Arduino’s open-source simplicity with Qualcomm’s AI, connectivity and security technologies, while Edge Impulse and Foundries.io provide machine learning and security-focused deployment tools.

The Dragonwing Q-8750 (www.qualcomm.com/internet-of-things/products/q8-series/q-8750) is Qualcomm’s most advanced IoT processor to date, engineered for high-performance edge computing and immersive experiences. Its AI engine achieves 77Tops with support for INT4/8/16 and FP16 precision, enabling real-time inference and even on-device large language models up to 11 billion parameters, eliminating cloud dependency for critical applications.

The processor’s camera architecture supports up to 12 physical cameras and triple 48MP ISPs, making it suitable for drones, media hubs and multi-angle vision systems.

The Dragonwing Q-7790 (www.qualcomm.com/internet-of-things/products/q-7790) brings more intelligence and responsiveness to consumer and industrial IoT devices. With 24Tops of on-device AI performance, it enables inference for applications such as smart cameras, AI TVs and collaboration systems, without relying on the cloud. Its multimedia capabilities include dual 4K60 display support, 4K60 encoding and 4K120 video decoding, including AV1 hardware decode for premium picture quality.

Security features such as total management engine, secure boot and trusted execution environment make it suitable for where data integrity is paramount.

The acquisition of Augentix, a Taiwanese semiconductor company specialising in smart imaging and low-power vision processing chips for IP security cameras, smart home devices and other connected video offerings, accelerates Qualcomm’s vision for security-focused, power-efficient edge AI across smart cameras and industrial IoT, integrating Augentix’s multimedia signal processing and high-resolution imaging. The result should be smarter, more secure IoT devices with sharper images, faster performance and lower energy use.

The Qualcomm Insight platform (www.qualcomm.com/internet-of-things/solutions/insight) is a unified, native AI-powered video intelligence offering delivered as a service for security and operations teams. It uses edge AI with an LLM-based conversational engine to turn videos into a real-time, profile-aware data plane. Users can modernise brownfield deployments using edge AI boxes or AI-enabled cameras, enabling use cases from enterprise security to protecting critical infrastructure.

With flexible hardware options, profile-based querying and real-time video analytics, the Insight platform is designed to scale virtually any industry and use case.

Furthermore, with the acquisition of Augentix, the Insight platform is poised to offer a broader and more flexible portfolio of smart cameras, helping system designers optimise camera selection for every zone while maintaining unified control and cost efficiency.

Devices across IoT verticals often rely on reliable, accurate and precise positioning capabilities to deliver certain services. From locating devices in open-air settings, as well as underground, when offline, and in emergency settings, Qualcomm’s terrestrial positioning services use a broad terrestrial signal network comprised of over nine billion wifi access points and more than 100 million cellular towers, along with beacon-based positioning methods using Bluetooth Low Energy to deliver over six trillion annual location results, without needing GNSS, while offering the ability to complement satellite-based positioning systems as well for enhanced location and a faster time-to-fix.

Edge Impulse is now fully integrated in the Dragonwing AI on-prem appliance. This all-in-one option enables users to run inference and training in a sovereign, highly security-focused package, supporting private networks and fully offline operations. Backed by the Edge Impulse platform, this offering supports efficient inference for models up to 120bn parameters. Users can manage their entire data pipeline, including AI-based synthetic data generation and labelling directly on the appliance.

With innovative resource allocation, the system acts as a physical AI agent, capable of handling ML-ops training, optimisation and localised model cascades for physical AI use cases, making it suitable for high-security environments.

For more information, visit qualcomm.com/iot.