Hillcrest Labs has announced that Coolpad Group (previously China Wireless) is using the company’s sensor hub software to enable “always on” sensing for Coolpad smartphones.
More specifically, Hillcrest’s Freespace software will run on Atmel’s low-power microcontroller (MCU) solutions to provide high performance sensor fusion, gesture recognition and always on context awareness capabilities – with dramatically lower power consumption and extended battery life.
“Coolpad realizes that sensors are critical to differentiate its functionality and maintain its dramatic growth in the global smartphone market,” said Chad Lucien, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Hillcrest Labs. “We’re proud to have been selected by Coolpad to provide the sensor hub functionality that will define its new mobile experience and enable context awareness, augmented reality, improved navigation and better gaming.”
As we’ve previously discussed on Bits & Pieces, sensor hubs are a separate class of chips designed to offload sensor management from the main processor for mobile phones and other devices. Essentially, they reduce the power requirements to add always on sensing in smartphones, tablets and wearables devices such as activity monitors, smartwatches, as well as head mounted displays (HMDs).
This enables gesture control, context awareness, pedestrian navigation, augmented reality, health and fitness monitoring, along with immersive gaming. Hillcrest’s sensor hub software products combine an array of sophisticated algorithms to provide low power, high performance sensor fusion and transform sensor data into valuable application-ready information.
Interested in learning more? You can check out Hillcrest’s official site here and Atmel’s MCU product page here.
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