Patrick Lai

Principal Engineer

Qualcomm

About Me

Patrick Lai is a Principal Engineer at Qualcomm with more than 20 years of experience in audio software engineering. Throughout his career, he has led the design and development of audio software across a diverse range of Qualcomm products starting from very first Android mobile phone

Patrick spearheaded the effort to establish AudioReach as an open-source project based on the Qualcomm Audio SDK — delivering an end-to-end development toolchain purpose-built for embedded systems and heterogeneous SoC architectures with multiple cores and power domains.

At ADC 2026, Patrick will be delivering a technical talk on AudioReach's architecture and its studio-to-silicon development workflow, as well as hosting a workshop giving hand-on experience of audio development on Qualcomm platforms.

Sessions

  • AudioReach

    Design for the Modern SoC
    12:20 - 12:50 UTC | Tuesday 10th November 2026 | Bristol 2
    Beginner
    Intermediate
    Advanced

    Modern SoCs offer audio developers an extraordinary array of specialized compute resources — Hexagon DSP, dedicated NPUs, and ultra-low-power aDSP — but unlocking these resources traditionally requires deep expertise in inter-process communication, shared memory management, interrupt handling, and multi-core scheduling that has nothing to do with audio development. This talk introduces AudioReach, Qualcomm's open-source SDK, and explains how its graph-based architecture abstracts this systems complexity so that audio developers can focus on what they do best. We will cover AudioReach's practical development workflow — from designing and simulating algorithms in MATLAB, through Hexagon DSP simulation and off-target graph construction in […]

  • Workshop 5: From Algorithm to Silicon

    Audio Development with AudioReachTM on Qualcomm Hardware
    14:00 - 17:00 UTC | Monday 9th November 2026 | Conservatory
    In-Person Only

    The rapid integration of AI into audio processing has created a new class of challenges for audio developers. Modern Qualcomm System-on-Chip (SoC) platforms offer powerful heterogeneous compute resources — including the Hexagon DSP, CPU cores, and a dedicated embedded Neural Processing Unit — capable of running sophisticated AI-powered audio algorithms at remarkable power efficiency. However, harnessing these resources traditionally requires deep expertise in inter-process communication, shared memory management, interrupt handling, multi-core scheduling, and power state optimization — a skillset far removed from the audio signal processing domain where most audio developers live. AudioReach, Qualcomm's open-source SDK, bridges this gap. By […]