Marc Naddell is VP of Ecosystems at MediaTek, one of the leading chipset manufacturers behind the IoT ecosystem. He came to the ReadWrite office to sit with Christopher Caen and talk about how one of the leading chipset providers managed to get ahead of the curve in developing for IoT.
“We looked at the potential for IoT and realized it’s either going to be huge, or it’s going to be really huge.” said Naddell. The MediaTek team, based in San Jose, decided they had to get involved. MediaTek was positioned as the major chipset provider for consumer electronics and fabless semiconductors. When they evaluated the opportunities within IoT, they realized the enormous potential and began to develop new chipsets.
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To do so, they launched MediaTek Labs and their first MediaTek LinkIt™ development platform (LinkIt ONE) in September 2014 and worked closely with IoT developers to understand the next wave of products. This is how they were able to design the next wave of developer offerings and released Linkit Connect 7681, adding to its new portfolio of Hardware Development Kits for IoT developers. It satisfied developer demand for simple connectivity to create IoT products like smart door locks, and light bulbs. For more advanced smart home and office solutions, MediaTek followed with a more feature-rich developer kit, the LinkIt Smart 7688.
The initiative to work closely IoT developers has proved successful with a number of developers using MediaTek solutions to move from prototypes to successful commercial products. Now, many enterprises are replicating the MediaTek method of running a similar “labs” program to better learn from developers. But as MediaTek managed to get ahead of the curve, they appear to have the advantage when it comes to connecting their customers with supply chain partners to manufacture and drive success for their IoT devices. Last year MediaTek overall shipped more than 1.5 billion chipsets for various devices, including smartphones and tablets.
