MediaTek said its latest LinkIt software development kit (SDK) plans include support for cellular technologies 3G and 4G but not said when.
The Taiwanese chipmaker this week unveiled its MediaTek Lab programme, with the LinkIT operating system, a hardware development kit, a SDK and other support services.
The LinkIt operating system is based on MediaTek’s Aster chip, which claims to be the smallest system-on-chip (SoC) currently in the market.
MediaTek’s Labs’ VP Marc Naddell told CBR the SoC plans to add support for 4G and 3G in the future.
"Our first focus was to make sure we got the size and the energy characteristics optimised because in order to get adoption by the end users our feeling was that the critical success factors were more about the size and the energy use of the product," he said in a briefing.
"So size and energy use were driving our design and now we’re exploring what will come on the roadmap but we haven’t made any decisions yet."
He added: "There may be a few purposes for the device and you may be able to download applications on top of that platform through your smartphone or your paired device that’s connected to a smartphone…and above that is the rich application platform and that’s really where we see most of the interest for having higher data throughput that would require 3G or 4G or LTE.
MediaTek, whose core business is in Asia, joins as the market for IoT becomes increasingly competitive.
