Qualcomm announced the establishment of the Qualcomm Innovation Center at the Yawan 5G AIOT Innovation Park in Kaohsiung, southern Taiwan, to support local industry and startups, and the announcement of the Qualcomm Wireless Reach 5G innovation education initiative to bridge the digital divide.
Liew said that as a global leader in wireless technology innovation, Qualcomm continues to develop technologies to improve people’s lives by collaborating with like-minded people who share the same aspirations to promote economic prosperity and social progress. said at a ceremony celebrating the opening of its new innovation centre and the signing of a memorandum of understanding with the Kaohsiung Exhibition Center.
As part of the Education Initiative, Qualcomm is partnering with Acer, Askey Computer Corp, Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS), XRSPACE, NewSoft, and mixed reality content creator Mifly Design to provide resources such as laptops, VR glasses, AR/VR editing tools, and materials, and 5G
Internet devices run on the Qualcomm Snapdragon mobile computing platform for several elementary and middle schools in the Tainan, Kaohsiung, and Pingtung regions of southern Taiwan. Teachers can use VR technologies to develop learning materials and improve teaching by visualizing abstract concepts in their surrounding context.
Students will be able to use VR devices in class, where low-latency 5G private networks are being built across campus to enable frictionless communication.
At the signing ceremony of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Kaohsiung Exhibition Center, Kaohsiung Mayor Chi-mai Chen emphasized that the city is doing everything possible to promote smart technology industries so that they can capitalize on the opportunities presented by the restructuring of global supply chains.
“Our goal is to make Kaohsiung industry network zero carbon and digital transformation, and Qualcomm’s 5G AIoT technology will play a key role in carbon reduction and digital transformation applications and scenarios such as education and healthcare,” Chen said.
This is not Qualcomm’s first project in Kaohsiung. In December 2020, Qualcomm and Chunghwa Telecom (CHT) jointly built the world’s first private network for 5G mmWave smart factory advanced semiconductor technology (ASE) at their Kaohsiung manufacturing site.
Qualcomm launched the Qualcomm Innovate in Taiwan Challenge (QITC) four years ago and incubated 39 startups in an innovation centre in Taipei. Since some of the startup teams are from southern Taiwan, Qualcomm decided to establish a new Qualcomm Innovation Center in Kaohsiung, southern Taiwan to meet the needs of young innovators. “A lab like this is calibrated, like oxygen for startups, because they can come to work, test, use high-tech equipment and build their products, use cases, and services,” said Sudeepto Roy, vice president of engineering.
Roy guides QITC startups in developing their intellectual property rights by providing professional consultation on patent applications.
In the new innovation center, Qualcomm collaborated with Compal Electronics to provide AR/VR devices, 5G mmWave and Sub-6Ghz private networks to support startups building their own products or using 5G AIoT, open RAN and robotics applications.
Qualcomm announced the shortlist of 10 startups for its 2022 QITC competition and gave these startups intensive training to prepare them for the final competition. In addition to the hardware and equipment startups need to test and build prototypes, Qualcomm also provides them with artificial intelligence (AI) computing power to build algorithms.
The finalists will be announced in mid-November. Although only the top three receive prize money each year, all selected teams are already considered part of the Qualcomm ecosystem and will maintain a long-term relationship with Qualcomm for future cooperation and business development, says Yvie Tai, who is in charge of Qualcomm’s business operations, operations development director and programme manager.
Leave a Reply