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Semiconductors and AI in home appliances: Critical and future relevant use cases

We’re bringing you the latest from the world of semiconductors – straight to your ears! From quick takes on trending applications to deep dives on product innovations, our experts give you their take on the tech behind the tech.

Podcast

Jul 29, 2025

Podcast

Join host Peter Balint on this episode of Podcast4Engineers as he delves into the fascinating world of home appliances, where the boundaries of innovation are constantly being pushed. Alongside guest expert, Walter Bell, they take a journey through the evolution of automation in home appliances, from humble beginnings to the cutting-edge technologies of today. Discover how the convergence of AI and semiconductors has revolutionized the way we live, making our daily lives more convenient, efficient, and connected. Tune in to find out how the perfect blend of human ingenuity and technological prowess is transforming the home appliance market, and what it means for the world of tomorrow.

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Speakers

In this episode of Podcast4Engineers, host Peter Balint speaks with Walter Bell, Director of Application Marketing for Home Appliances at Infineon.

Peter Balint

Host:

Peter Balint has shaped visual and audio narratives at Infineon since 2021. He’s a video producer with 20 years of experience and has produced podcasts for the past 10 years. Over his career, Peter has interviewed speakers from all over Europe, bringing high-quality media production and engaging conversations to the forefront of his work.

Walter Bell

Guest:

Walter Bell started his career at Infineon Technologies after graduating in the study of Telematics from the Graz Technical University in 2014. Starting as a Test Engineer allowed him to understand chip development bottom-up. His passion to develop better products focused on customer needs has motivated him to move into Product Marketing in 2019 where he was responsible for a broad range of 3D depth sensing products. In 2024 Walter took the opportunity to drive Infineon, into become an application focused company as Director of the Application Marketing team for Home Appliances.

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Guest: Currently, I think a lot of people still have the question, yeah, what is AI doing in my home appliances? And I think we are on a path where you see a lot of different ways how it can be implemented, and we are still figuring out what is the best way.

 

Host: Hello and welcome to the Podcast4Engineers. It's the podcast you just have to listen to if you're interested in what's going on in the semiconductor market. I'm your host, Peter Balint, and today we are joined by Walter Bell. He's the Director of Application Marketing specifically for home appliances. Welcome and thank you for coming in today.

 

Guest: Thank you, Peter. Thank you very much for having me.

 

Host: With home appliances, okay, the first thing that I start thinking about is To me, it's very binary. The washing machine is on or it's off. The stove is on or it's off. So how do semiconductors come into the mix here then?

 

Guest: It's basically a long story. It's— if you think about machines are helping us a lot and we figured it out already 100 years ago, it's more efficient to have a machine doing your laundry than you are standing there and doing everything manually. This is where we started to try to build machines. And that worked great. It worked great up to a certain level. And at a certain point, we figured out, okay, we reached the maximum, how to improve from there? And the companies behind were able to see that there is technology, semiconductors, that is helping them to build better motor control. So, this is a big aspect of why your laundry machine is looking different today. In the past, when it started to get more complex motor controls, they were including very simple control loops so that you get from one state into the next and you had to mechanically set your machine where it's doing it just with a simple timer. It was controlling the whole wash cycle. Today, this is much more complex. You have a motor that is spinning, that can spin at a certain speed. You have a variable speed drive with inverters that need to be controlled. And what we are seeing there is actually it's a cycle. We see that we are improving the control loops in our home appliances. And after that, we are able to get better digital machines. And in order to control them, we need better tools. So, in the past, it was very, very easy, just a mechanical wheel to set what you want for a washing program. Today, the machine can do much more. Therefore, you have a new user interface. You have a screen. You have touch interfaces. This is how this all evolved.

 

Host: Okay, so it's clear semiconductors are in home appliances to stay and even AI, and we'll talk about that a little bit later. But let's take an example like a refrigerator. Can you give me, and maybe you just did, you mentioned a few things, but what in the refrigerator relies on semiconductors to function?

 

Guest: I think the most principal thing is also the compressor. The compressor got better and better over the years. If you look at your electric bill 20 years ago, it was completely different. The fridge consumed a lot of energy. Now, with better motor control that has been implemented, we are getting to new power levels. We have improved the energy consumption of your fridge. On top of that, if you look at the most significant brands on the market, they have screens that allow you to interact with your home appliances, other home appliances, and your smart home. You can connect your fridge to your mobile phone. So therefore, you need more semiconductors in your fridge to be able to connect to the cloud, to the internet, to the mobile phone. You have additional features like a dispenser for ice cubes. It all sounds very simple, but each of these things needs a dedicated chip in order to control the thing and make sure it's functioning in the correct way.

 

Host: Okay. Some of these applications are visible and some are not. They're just more dedicated to efficiency, for example. So you mentioned the idea of a refrigerator, for example, being connected to your mobile phone. Let's talk now about appliances being connected to the internet. In an IoT fashion, we often hear that there are dangers associated with this and why should my refrigerator talk to the internet? There's got to be a good case for this though. Can you touch on this a little bit?

 

Guest: Absolutely. So, I think for many of the appliances, the user interface stayed for many years as it is. So, in the past, you only had one level that you can set your fridge and that's it. By connecting your appliances to the internet, for example, your laundry machine, now you have a smart system that can operate when the sun is shining. So, you're connecting your home appliances to a smart grid. This allows you again save power in a long way, making the machines more efficient. You have mentioned that of course this is a concern for security. Many of the users are worried about what is happening when I connect my machine to the cloud and the internet. Will everybody have access to my data, to my private data? If the machine has a microphone, will this be and to these things, of course, from Infineon side, this is something where we can also interact. We have a lot of know-how when it comes to developing passports, for example, and we are using this also to integrate this into other circuitries. We are offering our customers firmware that is proven from the EU, at European Union level. There is a new act that has been— is coming into place, the Cyber Resilience Act. Resilience Act will be announced and will be get into effect in December 2027. And this Cyber Resilience Act will ensure that over the whole life cycle of your home appliances, there will be updates and that your machines will come with security enabled by default. And if there are known vulnerabilities, that the suppliers of your home appliances will have to. fix it and make sure it's safe. Safety is a big concern and it's part of the product lifecycle.

 

Host: It sounds like this is all very regulated by a higher authority in terms of security and connecting to the internet.

 

Guest: From the beginning, connectivity was very new and of course it was a gimmick. Some applications had it, it was not as widespread. But now that it is coming into more and more devices, this is something where it makes sense to make sure that everybody who wants to sell his devices in the EU also has a deep thought on it when he is providing the appliances to you. Most people have had their appliances for 20 years. You want to make sure that over the whole lifespan of the product, it will also be updated when it comes to security violations so that there is no threat to your devices to your personal data.

 

Host: And anyone who's been around looking at devices in the area of home automation, they see this tag that's called Matter. How does Infineon play into that? Do we have to comply with something to be in this arena?

 

Guest: So, I think Matter will change a lot for us. I used the word gimmicky. Connectivity is gimmicky at the very beginning. And this was because the first devices which were connected to your mobile phone were using one app. This one app was the only one that could control the device. And if for some reason over the lifespan of the device, this app did not get an update, it was no longer available with the latest Android version and so on, it simply was lost. No way to connect and control it anymore. And this was also for some of the customers frustrating. In the very beginning, it made it harder to connect to your devices. And this is what Matter is going to change. Matter is now since 2023 coming to home appliances, including home appliances in their use, and since 2024 also for energy management. And this is what I mentioned, the example that your laundry machine is running when the sun is shining. It is a feature that is now the core and the basis of Matter. And Matter allows that you, the device that you were buying, can run from all the Matter systems that you're using, no matter if you're using Google Play, if you're using Apple, if you're using Samsung, all these smart ecosystems that exist, with any of them, your devices will function. And this interoperability will ensure that no matter what happens to the app of the vendor who sold you the device, it will still work in a connected way and it will work in a smarter way because it can work with all your home appliances that you have at home. And I think in addition to that, when it comes to AI, this will be a big game changer for this interconnection as well.

 

Host: Let's talk about that a little bit, the concept of AI creeping into our appliances. How will this happen actually, or is it already happening?

 

Guest: It's already happening. So, if you are going to one of the big events around the world, for example, the IFA in Berlin, you will see AI at every booth of the home appliance vendors. AI is really at the core currently, I think a lot of people still have the question, what is AI doing in my home appliances? And I think we are on a path where you see a lot of different ways how it can be implemented. And we are still figuring out what is the best way. But it is definitely there. There are already applications where your smart oven has a camera built in. It sees a pizza in your oven and suggests that, okay, I've seen a pizza. How do you want the crust? So, baking it in the perfect way. And this is then again making the user interface easier. This is how AI will change the interaction with home appliances.

 

Host: Do you think AI is still in the gimmicky stages at this point?

 

Guest: I think we see first devices that come with AI that is really super functional. There are, for example, a couple of vendors who have AI user manuals. So instead of you going through a user manual, this tool is directly recognizing, oh, you have a problem with your laundry machine, it's stuck in a certain case, this is what you can do and directly come up with a suggestion for you. Also, the example with the oven. I think if you try it and it's not working in all the cases right now, then you might perceive it as gimmicky. But when it's really working in a robust way, then you know, okay, it's here to stay. And I think AI is here to stay in home appliances. There are a lot of interesting ways you can use AI in home appliances.

 

Host: Okay. Do your customers tell you how they want to use AI or do you suggest to them how they should be using AI?

 

Guest: It's a couple of both. I think, of course, from Infineon side, we know what our products can do. We have the greatest microphones in the world. So, of course, verbal interaction is a big path for AI, natural language models. This is really something that I believe will be a big portion of laundry machines. For example, my laundry machine has 14 programs and I don't know what all of these do. But if I could ask my laundry machine, okay, I'm washing now my shirt today and my red socks, and the laundry machine could answer, there is no program to do that. Please do it in 2 separate stages. That would be a good suggestion. And I think this is something that you do not need to go to the cloud with. This is something like a small user manual that can run on the edge. It can run on the laundry machine.

 

Host: Okay, so you say edge. Can you define what that means?

 

Guest: So, when talking about AI, usually everybody is thinking about ChatGPT. This is, I think, the AI implementation most of us have used. And this is running on server farms which are huge, which are consuming tons of power to give you a quick response. You can ask any question to them, and I'm always surprised by what they're coming back with. So yes, today it's also not perfect yet. It's coming up with some wrong answers or some answers where you can dig deeper in. But when I think back 2 years ago, I think that there was a huge improvement. Now I get sources. So where is this information coming from and directly linked to it? That helps me really to make sure that I'm not quoting anything that was dreamt up by the AI. And this is helping me a lot when using AI in my daily work. And I think this is happening in the cloud. These are huge data centers which are able to process this. And when I'm talking about the edge, I mean it's running in the machine, in the machine without cloud connectivity, that is on the edge. On the edge of the internet, there is a device which might not be connected at all and still has AI capabilities.

 

Host: Okay. It is possible to utilize AI directly on the device without having to be connected

 

Guest: Exactly.

 

Host: Okay. Let's now take a look at the key categories of AI in home appliances.

 

Guest: When I was looking over the shows, what was announced by all the vendors in home appliances, I've seen that there are 3 main categories of AI applications today. One big category of features and functions that has been announced works on a camera. A camera is watching the oven and you're figuring out what is in the oven and you are identifying an object, object recognition. And based on this information, you make a decision. You control the device based on cameras. Another way is acoustic AI, which means that you're listening to something. You do noise suppression, for example, or you do various commands like I think the most common one in the past is, hey Alexa, so to call out your smart home. And nowadays you can make this verbally. You do not need any keywords anymore. The natural language models have gone to a level where you can really ask any questions verbally and you get verbal feedback. And this is quite interesting. And the third aspect actually that I'm seeing is autonomous control. That means that you are implementing control, motor control, for example. Your motor in the laundry machine is spinning around, and it's detected by the currents in the motor that there's something wrong. The laundry machine is wobbling. Maybe I should go at a different speed or turn down the speed. Something is not correct. This also has to do with diagnostics. So, what's happening with the machine? There is an error code, what can I do to fix it? And there are a couple of different applications in these 3 main categories that we are seeing today and that we can address with our products.

 

Host: Well, thank you so much. You kind of made home appliances cool today, so that's, that's quite a feat. There's more to talk about and we will be getting together again real soon to talk again on a podcast. Until then, thank you so much for joining us today.

 

Guest: Thank you very much. It's been a big pleasure to be here.

 

Host: And for our audience, thank you for joining us today. We look forward to seeing you again. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.

 

Guest: Bye-bye.