On this episode of The Six Five – In the Booth, host Steven Dickens is joined by Qualinx B.V.’s Tom Trill, CEO for a conversation on revolutionizing the semiconductor industry with GNSS solutions.
Their discussion covers:
- How Qualinx’s patented Digital RF (DRF) technology is uniquely positioned to transform the semiconductor industry and its distinguishing features.
- The impact of Qualinx’s QLX300+ chip in maximizing efficiency and design for optimal performance, promoting affordable connectivity and edge IoT.
- Strategies employed by Qualinx to remain at the forefront of technological advancements and maintain relevance in an ever-evolving industry.
Learn more at Qualinx.
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Transcript:
Steven Dickens: Hello and welcome. This is Six Five In the Booth, coming to you live from Mobile World Congress. We’re on the Four Years From Now Pavilion, and I’m joined by Tom Trill, the CEO of Qualinx. Hey Tom, welcome to the show.
Tom Trill: Yeah, thanks, Steven. Good to see you.
Steven Dickens: The show is crazy this year. What is it, 95,000 attendees?
Tom Trill: Yeah, 95, it’s up by 10 or 15 for the year.
Steven Dickens: Fantastic opportunity for some of those startups and sort of Series B companies to get some profile at the event. But before we dive into that, position your role and tell us a little bit about Qualinx, and we’ll dive in from there.
Tom Trill: Great. Thanks, Steven. Yeah. So, Qualinx was spun out at TU Delft in the Netherlands about 2015, late 2015 timeframe. Couple of PhD students, and they broke through a physics barrier when it comes to Digital RF. It was a 40-year-old physics barrier, and that was part of their thesis. We have broad IP coverage and broad patent coverage for the invention. It’s generally called Digital RF. We are now productizing all of that IP and we’re headed into our third tape out, which will be our production product for a release towards the end of the year.
Steven Dickens: And we’ve got the technology with us. Tell us a little bit about what you guys have done, because we’ve been tracking you now for just over a year. We met here last year, breakthrough technology that the team has developed, cutting edge tech. Tell us a little bit more.
Tom Trill: Yeah, great, thanks. Yeah, so we’re on a very advanced note for RF technology. And you’re right, it is hard to actually make it out from the dev kit here because our physical size is really competitive. We’re headed down towards the six millimeter squared form factor, and we have an exceptionally efficient power profile. The source of the power efficiency comes from the intrinsic characteristics of Digital RF, the underlying IP, the architecture, and the process node. With all those combined, we have a very generational competitive advantage in both die size, performance power, and a very competitive cost base for a startup, which is critical.
Steven Dickens: So, position where the use cases. We’ve spent a bunch of time over the last year talking about some of those use cases, but I think the listeners are going to find that fascinating. Tell us a little bit more how the technology’s actually going to make it into devices and things that we see out there in the marketplace.
Tom Trill: Yeah, well, I’m very much a market driven guy, and what I’m about to say goes a little bit against my training and nature.
Steven Dickens: We’re pushing you, we’re pushing you.
Tom Trill: I’ve tried to be market driven in terms of use cases, but it boils down to three applications, positioning, timing, and tracking. They’re the broad applications that we address, and underneath each one of those, there’s just a plethora of different segments and end user markets. Some prime examples would be in terms of timing, smart cities, you have to have precise timing at every intersection to make it all work, and that comes from satellites. Tracking, asset trackers, head trackers, et cetera, et cetera.
Steven Dickens: And that’s where that form factor comes in, right? Just getting it so small opens up some of those use cases.
Tom Trill: Yeah, yeah, you’re right on. And the value proposition of the physical size and the power profile really impacts the end user’s design philosophy. They can shrink the design to have a smaller battery and get the same battery life out of their end product using our technology. We’re as much as 10X lower power than some of the competing solutions.
Steven Dickens: And some of the things we’ve been talking about over the last year, the positioning piece, some of the use cases there, that power footprint really makes a difference in the actual device. Tell us a little bit more.
Tom Trill: Yeah, yeah. So, we’ve benchmarked against a lot of different competitors and a lot of different use cases when it comes to power. Everybody talks about low power, ultra low power, and that’s a wonderful baseline. But for Qualinx, we go beyond thinking about ultra low power in the purity of power. We talk about power optimization. Not every use case needs low power. They need to optimize the power to performance behavior of the device in-situ in the application.
Steven Dickens: Yeah.
Tom Trill: So, we really view our power profile has been application driven and you can adjust the performance of the device itself to be fit to purpose, and then the power falls out from there.
Steven Dickens: So, tell us about so where you guys are from a journey point of view, there’s some hard engineering, some patent work, there’s kind of breakthrough technology. Maybe frame that for us a little and how that’s got us to where we are. This is a series two tape out from you guys more to come, but tell us a little bit about kind of how that pure R&D has found its way into what we’re seeing today.
Tom Trill: Yeah. Well, you know semiconductors, you’ve been around a long time. It’s not for the faint of heart.
Steven Dickens: Yeah, it’s true R&D at the cutting edge.
Tom Trill: Oh, it is. Yeah. Yeah, and we’re right there. This is our second tape out, and it was good enough and actually so good that we decided to turn it into our dev kit and we gave a release of that dev kit about a year ago to strategic customers.
Steven Dickens: And what’s that reaction mean?
Tom Trill: Oh, it’s a complete validation of our power claims, which is very important for our stakeholders, our investors, or even our employees. And morale boost that several different OEMs come back and say, “Yeah, this is really competitive from a power base.”
Steven Dickens: And that’s vital that validation, those guys are going to be doing that type of testing. That speaks volumes to where you guys are from a pure R&D point of view and the progress of the business, I think.
Tom Trill: Yeah, absolutely. And by doing that, about a year ago, we knew we were about a year away from the pre-production tape out, which is happening right now. And that allows our customers to really open up a qual slot and for us to identify the intercept points in their new product introductions. So, everything is lining up reasonably well for us, for a product launch in second half.
Steven Dickens: I was going to say we’ve been tracking the progress. Tell us as much as you can, obviously what that next maybe 6, 9, 12 months looks like?
Tom Trill: Yeah, yeah. So, product launch in second half.
Steven Dickens: Okay.
Tom Trill: And mass production ramp will be driven by those customer adoption rates, somewhere between the Q4, Q1 timeframe, Q1 ’25. So, I expect when we’re back here next year, we’ll be in mass production.
Steven Dickens: We’ll be recording another video talking about a little success.
Tom Trill: Yeah, I hope so. Yeah.
Steven Dickens: So, for our listeners, if we can get just maybe three takeaways, give me the sort of Qualinx story and what you guys have been doing in RF in those three punchy takeaways for the listeners.
Tom Trill: Yeah, great. Thank you. So, Digital RF, what that really means is about 80% of any analog RF radio is now migrated over to digital CMOS, and you get all of the benefits from digital CMOS as a result.
Steven Dickens: Yeah.
Tom Trill: We know what they are. They’re power intrinsically, lower power, smaller form factor, and scalability, really important. Secondly, I talked about application optimized power, and that comes from the inherent and intrinsic reconfigurability characteristics of our architecture. Meaning that you’re not locked into one or two modes. You have full control over how you drive our receiver, and therefore whatever power budget you have, you can optimize our chip to fit in.
Steven Dickens: That’s crucial.
Tom Trill: And scalability. So, and that comes in two forms. When we think about our architecture, firstly, we can shrink. We have a generational advantage because we are CMOS based. We can continue to shrink, but also more importantly, where Digital RF enables software defined radios, and software defined radio will eventually replace a hardware redesign cycle that most of our customers require nowadays. So, by virtue of designing those in, once you get to redeploy that same hardware design through software upgrades.
Steven Dickens: Yeah.
Tom Trill: Yeah.
Steven Dickens: So Tom, we’re starting to wrap up. You’ve got a busy show whilst we were setting up the traffic here has been fantastic. What would be that one key takeaway that you’d want the listeners to get from our interview today? And then we’ll wrap up.
Tom Trill: Yeah, so future-proof of design, design hardware once, and then reconfigure and redeploy through software.
Steven Dickens: Well, Tom, it’s been great to chat. I always enjoy engaging. I’m looking forward already to next year to catch up. You’ve been watching us here on the Four Years From Now Pavilion at Mobile World Congress. Please click and subscribe and do all those things to help the algorithm, and we’ll see you next time. Thank you very much for watching.
Author Information
Regarded as a luminary at the intersection of technology and business transformation, Steven Dickens is the Vice President and Practice Leader for Hybrid Cloud, Infrastructure, and Operations at The Futurum Group. With a distinguished track record as a Forbes contributor and a ranking among the Top 10 Analysts by ARInsights, Steven's unique vantage point enables him to chart the nexus between emergent technologies and disruptive innovation, offering unparalleled insights for global enterprises.
Steven's expertise spans a broad spectrum of technologies that drive modern enterprises. Notable among these are open source, hybrid cloud, mission-critical infrastructure, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and FinTech innovation. His work is foundational in aligning the strategic imperatives of C-suite executives with the practical needs of end users and technology practitioners, serving as a catalyst for optimizing the return on technology investments.
Over the years, Steven has been an integral part of industry behemoths including Broadcom, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and IBM. His exceptional ability to pioneer multi-hundred-million-dollar products and to lead global sales teams with revenues in the same echelon has consistently demonstrated his capability for high-impact leadership.
Steven serves as a thought leader in various technology consortiums. He was a founding board member and former Chairperson of the Open Mainframe Project, under the aegis of the Linux Foundation. His role as a Board Advisor continues to shape the advocacy for open source implementations of mainframe technologies.
