(iTers News) – As an increasing number of home appliances are now being built with embedded CPUs, OS software, LCD touch panels, and even Wi-Fi communications modules, they are getting as smart as tablet PCs and smart phones.
Spearheading the smart phenomenon is Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. that has lined up every important key building block from semiconductor chips to TFT-LCDs to OSes.
The global IT titan today unveiled a line of what the company terms as smart home appliances, or white goods, including smart refrigerators, smart microwave ovens, smart washing machines, and even smart home maid robots.
Coming complete with CPU and OS, for example, Samsung’s smart refrigerators are intelligent enough to allow housewives to order daily necessities like vegetables and fruits on-line for immediate delivery
Equally amazing is that they can not only check price lists and inventories online, but also put their wish-to-purchase items on a virtual cart for future buying. Samsung is now working together with E-mart, Korean multi-shopping mall for grocery and miscellaneous products, to allow consumers to put orders online at nearby E-mart stores.
At the heart of the smart refrigerators is a built-in LCD touch panel screen that sits at the center of its left front door. Running on Linux, or Windows CE embedded OS, the LCD touch panel is a sort of a stripped-down tablet PC that is built around 32 bit ARM core-based embedded CPU and Wi-Fi module.
Refrigerators on your fingertip
Cramming together a 700/800MHz ARM Cortex A9, 16Kbyte cache memories, GPU/3D graphic accelerator, and other peripherals on a single silicon die, the CPU was supplied by Korean fabless chip maker Nexell Co., Ltd.
The LCD touch screen panel isn’t as powerful as a full-scale tablet PC, but is smart enough to enable users to send and organize their photo library. Users also not only can keep recipes constantly updated, but also manage their daily schedules and check weather conditions
Once connected to a living room TV via an external HDMI cable, the touch screen can work as a second TV.
The smart refrigerator is now available in the U.S. as well as EU markets, selling for around US$3,400
At a press conference here held in Seoul, Sungmi Chung(鄭常務), vice president with Sales and Marketing Team, Digital Appliances, “The smart home appliances are not a distant future, but are surfacing as an immediate reality, as a manufacturing ecosystem for M2M, or machine to machine service is increasingly getting matured”
As smart is its washing machine that also incorporates a tiny LCD touch panel screen. Using a preloaded smartphone apps, consumers not only can locate where it went wrong, but also get a wind of how, to what degree their laundries are washed. Consumers can switch on or off and off the washing machines using their smartphones.
Equally smart is its microwave ovens that can automatically adjust cooking time and strength settings depending on recipes. For example, consumers can download recipes to their smartphones and then send over Wi-Fi network and keep them on the microwave oven to adjust it to match what are on recipes
Samsung’s vision for smart home appliances doesn’t stop there. The company is now trying to converge Wi-Fi, smartphone, and cloud computing technologies to create a smart home networking system where all of Samsung’s smart gadgets and home appliances work together to share contents and apps.
Stakes out as next growth catalyst
Under the system, for example, consumers can use their smartphone to remotely control and manage all smart home appliances, not only switching on and off them, but also resetting temperature and cooking time and strength on the move.
What’s more interesting, they can take advantage of a smart grid technology to manage energy saving in their homes, because they can calibrate their smart home appliances to consume or less electricity at a demand peak time, but operate them to full throttle at a time when demand is low.
“All of our smart home appliances are demand response, or DR-ready for the smart grid network. Once electricity power plants get into action to offer a smart grid service, our smart home appliances can automatically adjust their operating time depending on ups and downs in the demand and supply cycle for electricity, said Changwan Hongghd(洪副社長), executive vice president with Digital Appliance Business.
Added he, “We aim to be world No.1 make of smart home appliances.”
Led by booming demand in the U.S. and EU markets, according to Samsung, worldwide smart home appliances markets would grow to hit US$6.4 billion in sales by 2015, and then by 2020, it would nearly double to US$ 10.1 billion.
To take the lion’s share of the pie, Samsung is now operating 11 overseas manufacturing facilities for home appliances in 9 countries across the world, including Suzhou, China, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, India, Mexico, Brazil, and Poland. Its factory in Poland operating to serve smart home appliances markets in EU, while the Mexico plant is for the North American markets. To serve Brazilian markets, the company plans to establish one more manufacturing facility in Brazil.
As home appliances are bulky and heavy, the overseas plants can help Samsung not only to save logistics costs, but also better serve customers with on-time delivery.