We looked at Imagination Technologies’ FlowWorld concept this summer. That effort put in place a cloud portal for a variety of services to be accessed by wireless connected devices.

They’ve now announced a new board they call the MiniMorph to complement that effort. It features a Toumaz Xenif TZ1090 processor, which integrates the CPU, WiFi, and audio subsystem (along with other peripheral support blocks) in a single chip.

The idea here is to take another step in lowering the barriers to creating connected devices of various kinds by providing what can be used as a reference design and prototype board with the chip, software, and cloud IP already in place. This is intended to let the designer focus on the unique value that his or her company is adding to the device instead of being distracted by all the details required to get the connectivity portion working. This could be of considerable benefit in consumer-oriented devices, where product lifetimes are incredibly short.

While they say that the board is engineered to be production-worthy, they also expect that really high-volume applications will likely have specific form-factor and connectivity requirements different from that of the MiniMorph. But they’re presumably betting that the MiniMorph will engender greater use of Imagination Technologies IP in the production designs.

More information can be found in their release…