Start-up shows socs with which smartwatches have a battery life of a month

A start-up that has received funding from Samsung and Qualcomm, among others, has presented its first line of socs for wearables. The socs should allow a battery life of one month with portable telephone accessories such as watches.

The line of socs with the name Dhanush comes in four variants. There are less powerful variants for wearables, while the more luxurious versions can also display advanced graphics and run mobile operating systems. The company behind the socs, the American-Indian Ineda, says that all socs should allow a battery life of one month. Ineda does not state what the requirements are in terms of, for example, battery size to achieve that month, but does claim that the battery life is up to ten times as good as with current wearables.

The more luxurious versions have a ‘sensor hub’, which can process input from sensors separately from the application processor, so that wearables can always listen to voice commands and, for example, count steps.

The company has disclosed few technical details about the processors for wearables, such as which architecture and core they are based on, whether and which GPU is on board and whether the socs also have onboard support for wireless technologies such as WiFi and Bluetooth. Images on the site indicate that the socs will have multiple processor cores on board: an application processor class core, a low-power processor and a core for the sensor hub. The company refers to the socs itself as a ‘wpu’, wearable processing unit.