CES 2023: Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC for Assisted Driving, Entertainment Unveiled by Qualcomm

Mobile chip maker Qualcomm on Wednesday unveiled a processor chip for the car called Snapdragon Ride Flex SoC that handles both assisted driving and cockpit functions, including entertainment.

Previously those functions were handled on different chips and merging them can help bring down costs, said Nakul Duggal, Qualcomm’s head of automotive.

“Obviously you are reducing the number of physical boxes. So, it goes down to a single box. You reduce the amount of memory that you need. The extra external components that you need, those go down,” Duggal told Reuters.

Qualcomm has been steadily building up its automotive business in recent years and in September it said its automotive business “pipeline” increased to $30 billion (roughly Rs. 2.5 lakh crore).

With electric vehicles and increasing autonomous features in cars, the number of chips used by automakers is surging and the automotive market has been a key growth area for chipmakers.

Duggal said automotive customers are already trying out the new chip and it would be commercially available in the first half of next year.

Last month, Qualcomm announced its next-generation Wi-Fi 7 Immersive Home Platform which is designed and optimised for home mesh Wi-Fi networking systems, according to the company. The platform includes two new processors that utilise 5GHz and 6GHz frequency bands while supporting 240MHz and 320MHz channels, respectively.

The company’s Wi-Fi 7 Immersive Home Platform technology is built based on modular chipset architecture which delivers over 20GBps of total system capacity. Qualcomm claims that the processor technology has been engineered to enable collaboration, telepresence, AR/VR, and immersive gaming of “today’s and tomorrow’s homes”. Commercial sales are expected to begin in the second half of 2023, according to the firm.