Ambiq has recently been recognised as Frost & Sullivan’s 2025 Global Company of the Year for its outstanding contributions to healthcare semiconductor solutions.
“Electronics Media had an exclusive conversation with Charlene Wan, VP of Marketing and Investor Relations at Ambiq, who shares insights into how the company is revolutionising AI-Powered Healthcare at the Edge, enabled by ultra-low-power semiconductor solutions.”
Charlene Wan of Ambiq Talks Power Efficiency, AI, and the Future of Smart Medical Devices From their ultra-low power SPOT® platform and the Apollo510 SoC to developer tools like neuralSPOT and heartKIT, Charlene walks us through how Ambiq is enabling a new era of AI-powered digital health. She also highlights the value of partnerships with companies like CardioMedive and Smartaly, and how Ambiq is working closely with healthcare leaders to bring intelligent, energy-efficient health monitoring devices to market—transforming how and where care is delivered.
Ambiq has just been named Frost & Sullivan’s 2025 Global Company of the Year in healthcare semiconductor solutions. What core strategies do you believe most contributed to this recognition?
Charlene Wan: We are honored by this recognition from Frost & Sullivan. Our success stems from finding opportunities to differentiate our technology and deliver solutions that address real market needs.
Ambiq’s unique value proposition centers on our proprietary Subthreshold Power Optimized Technology (SPOT®) platform, which reduces power consumption to previously unattainable levels. This enables us to help customers build intelligent devices optimized for power-intensive applications, such as AI, that consume minimal power, require little to no network connectivity, and provide secure platforms for sensitive data, including health information.
Over the past 15 years, we’ve helped customers specializing in health-tracking wearables deliver more accurate results through continuous monitoring. The natural evolution into medical-grade digital health devices aligns perfectly with our capabilities, as this field demands exactly what SPOT delivers: continuous monitoring, high performance, reliability, and security. By partnering with leading healthcare innovators, we’re exploring a future where healthcare extends far beyond hospital settings and wall-powered monitors.
With the Apollo510 SoC and the broader Apollo series, Ambiq is setting new benchmarks for energy efficiency and AI readiness. Can you elaborate on how these innovations are enabling next-gen digital health applications?
Charlene Wan: The Apollo series, built on our SPOT platform, delivers unprecedented energy efficiency for AI-powered health devices. We’re enabling manufacturers to create devices that are both feature-rich and genuinely practical for continuous use.
The key breakthrough is enabling intelligent health tracking that operates in real-time for days or weeks on a single charge. Healthcare devices require a delicate balance of performance, energy efficiency, and usability—an area where many smart health devices currently fall short.
Take the Apollo510: it can run complex neural networks directly on-device without requiring cloud connectivity, unlocking near-instant insights for critical applications such as fall detection, heart rate variability monitoring, anomaly detection, and personalized coaching. This on-device processing simultaneously reduces latency, extends battery life, and preserves user privacy—three factors essential for healthcare adoption.
These advancements extend across our entire Apollo SoC portfolio, giving businesses of all sizes the right foundation for continuous health monitoring devices. Whether it’s a startup developing specialized wearables or an established medical device company, our SoCs provide the computational power needed for AI-driven health insights without compromising on the energy efficiency that makes continuous monitoring practical.
How does Ambiq maintain this foresight in a rapidly changing healthcare tech landscape?
Charlene Wan: When we think in terms of where our technology fits within today’s landscape, we’re planning for what’s possible five years from now. It’s not just about meeting current needs—it’s about anticipating the future. We ask ourselves and our partners: What do you want to do that you can’t do yet? And it’s this forward-thinking mindset that drives everything we do.
When we share this perspective with customers, we often see their eyes light up. Suddenly, they’re thinking beyond today’s limitations. They’re envisioning devices that can run larger and more advanced AI models without relying on the cloud or sensors that can deliver medical-grade insights in real time. That’s when the real collaboration begins. They tell us about their vision, and we get to say: “We can help you build that.”
We maintain this foresight through several key approaches: substantial long-term R&D investments that push energy efficiency boundaries, building flexible platforms like the Apollo510 that can support applications not yet imagined, and maintaining close partnerships to ensure our innovations align with industry direction. At its core, it’s about being proactive rather than reactive. While the healthcare technology landscape is changing rapidly, our commitment to forward-thinking development enables us not only to keep pace but also to lead the industry toward new possibilities.
Ambiq emphasizes partnerships with companies like CardioMedive and Smartaly. How do these collaborations influence your product development and accelerate time-to-market for healthcare solutions?
Charlene Wan: Partnerships are fundamental to Ambiq’s approach to innovation. Our collaborations with companies like CardioMedive and Smartaly keep us closely aligned with real-world applications and industry challenges. These partners bring deep expertise in remote patient monitoring and AI-driven diagnostics, helping validate our technology in both clinical and consumer environments. In return, we provide low-power, high-performance platforms that enable them to build more innovative, efficient, and longer-lasting devices.
These collaborations and partnerships with other customers, as well as our salesforce, directly shape our product development process. We receive early feedback on what’s working, what’s needed, and what requires improvement—not in lab conditions, but in actual healthcare deployments. This real-world insight enables us to refine our technology roadmap and prioritize features that deliver the maximum impact for edge computing applications.
The result is significantly accelerated time-to-market for healthcare solutions. Rather than developing in isolation and hoping our technology meets market needs, we’re co-developing with companies that understand the specific requirements of healthcare applications. This collaborative approach ensures that our SoCs are optimized for the exact use cases our partners bring to market, reducing the typical development cycles and validation periods that can delay the introduction of innovative healthcare devices.
Kindly brief us about SPOT platform and solutions like neuralSPOT and heartKIT which are bringing edge AI to healthcare. What’s next for Ambiq in this space, especially as AI continues to reshape diagnostics and patient care?
Charlene Wan: SPOT is the foundation of all our technology, based on subthreshold transistor design. Traditional semiconductors stop functioning when voltage drops below 1V—but our SPOT platform not only continues operating at these ultra-low voltages, it dramatically reduces power consumption as voltage decreases. While this sounds straightforward in theory, the challenges of controlling temperature variations, device inconsistencies, and voltage fluctuations made it nearly impossible to implement outside laboratory settings—until Ambiq solved these challenges. We’re the only semiconductor company to successfully bring subthreshold technology to mass market, powering over 270 million devices.
Our neuralSPOT and heartKIT solutions build on SPOT by giving AI developers streamlined, optimized tools to test, train, and deploy AI models on our SoCs. This dramatically reduces development time—developers can implement popular AI models for speech, sleep, and health monitoring in minutes rather than months.
Looking ahead, we’re continuously advancing SPOT to achieve even lower power consumption and higher performance. Our AI development kit will expand with more pre-optimized models specifically for healthcare applications. Most importantly, we’re exploring breakthrough opportunities in edge-based digital health that will redefine what’s possible with semiconductor technology.
As AI reshapes diagnostics and patient care, we see enormous potential for truly intelligent devices that can provide medical-grade insights anywhere, anytime—without depending on cloud connectivity or frequent charging. That’s the future we’re building toward: healthcare technology that’s as mobile and continuous as life itself.
