Qualcomm
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| Qualcomm Inc. | |
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| Type | Public (NASDAQ: QCOM) |
| Founded | San Diego, California, USA (1985) |
| Headquarters |  San Diego, California USA |
| Key people | Dr. Irwin M. Jacobs, Chairman Dr. Paul E. Jacobs, CEO Steve Altman, President Dr.Sanjay Jha, COO & President, QCT William Keitel, EVP & CFO Len Lauer EVP & Group President Dr.Roberto Padovani EVP and CTO Franklin Antonio EVP and Chief Scientist |
| Industry | Wireless |
| Products | CDMA Chipsets BREW Eudora OmniTRACS MediaFLO QChat uiOne |
| Revenue | ▲ $8.87 billion USD (2007) |
| Net income | ▲ $3.30 billion USD (2007) |
| Employees | ▲ 12,800 (2008) |
| Website | www.qualcomm.com |
Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) is a wireless telecommunications research and development company based in San Diego, California.
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[edit] History
Qualcomm was founded in 1985 by Irwin Jacobs (the company's current chairman), Franklin Antonio, Adelia Coffman, Andrew Cohen, Klein Gilhousen, Andrew Viterbi and Harvey White. Jacobs and Viterbi had previously founded Linkabit. Qualcomm's first products and services included the OmniTRACS satellite locating and messaging service, used by long-haul trucking companies, developed by Parviz Nazarian and Neil Kadisha, and specialized integrated circuits for digital radio communications such as a Viterbi decoder.
Qualcomm then began to manufacture CDMA cell phones, base stations, and chips. The first CDMA techology was standardized as IS-95. Qualcomm has since developed newer variations on the same theme, including IS-2000 and 1xEV-DO (IS-856). It formerly manufactured both CDMA cell phones and CDMA base station equipment. Qualcomm sold its base station business to Ericsson and its cell phone manufacturing to Kyocera, and has focused on developing and licensing wireless technologies and selling ASICs that implement them.
Qualcomm also participated in the development of the Globalstar satellite system (along with Loral Space & Communications) and partnered with Technicolor to develop a digital cinema system. It developed BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless), a proprietary platform for cell phones. It also maintains and sells the Eudora email program.
In 1997, Qualcomm paid $18 million for the naming rights to the Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego, renaming it to Qualcomm Stadium. The naming rights will belong to Qualcomm until 2017.
In October 2004, Qualcomm acquired Trigenix Ltd, a mobile user interface (UI) software development company, based in Cambridge, UK. After integrating the company, Qualcomm re-branded their interface markup language and its accompanying integrated development environment (IDE) uiOne.
Since April 2006, a dispute between Reliance Communication and Qualcomm over royalty fees has cost Qualcomm approximately $11.7b in market capitalization.[1]. In July 2007, Reliance and Qualcomm decided to bury the hatchet and agreed to expand the use of CDMA technology in India.[2]
In June 2007, the U.S. International Trade Commission blocked the import of new cell phone models based on particular Qualcomm microchips. They found that these Qualcomm microchips infringe patents owned by Broadcom. Broadcom has also initiated patent litigation in U.S. courts over this issue.
At issue is software designed to extend battery life in chips while users make out-of-network calls. In October, an ITC administrative judge made an initial ruling that Qualcomm violated the Broadcom patent covering that feature and the commission later affirmed the decision.
Sprint Nextel Corp. is using a software patch from Qualcomm to get around a U.S. government agency ban on new phones with Qualcomm chips.
In August 2007, Judge Rudi Brewster held that Qualcomm had engaged in litigation misconduct by withholding relevant documents during the lawsuit it brought against Broadcom and that Qualcomm employees had lied about their involvement.
[edit] Products
OmniTRACS is a two-way satellite communications and geolocation trailer tracking technology designed for the over-the-road transport market. As of summer 2005, over 567,000 units have been shipped to transport companies on 4 continents.
Qualcomm is the inventor of CDMAone (IS-95), CDMA 2000, and CDMA 1xEV-DO, which are wireless cellular standards used for communications. The company also owns significant number of key patents on the widely adopted 3G technology, W-CDMA. The license streams from the patents on these inventions, and related products are a major component of Qualcomm's business.
Qualcomm designs various ARM architecture CDMA and UMTS modem chipsets designated Mobile Station Modem (MSM), baseband radio processors, and power processor chips. These chipsets are sold to mobile phone manufacturers such as Kyocera, Motorola, Sharp, Sanyo, LG and Samsung for integration into CDMA and UMTS cell phones. Although a "fabless" semiconductor company, meaning Qualcomm does not engage in the actual manufacturing process, the chips the firm has designed are powering a significant number of handsets and devices world wide, both in CDMA and UMTS markets. As of summer of 2007, Qualcomm is among the top-ten semiconductor firms, after Intel, Texas Instruments, Samsung, and a few others.
BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless) is a proprietary cell phone application platform. Unlike J2ME (Java Platform, Micro Edition), BREW is proprietary. Unlike some J2ME implementations, BREW is designed so that the platform rejects unsigned applications. In order to have an application signed, a developer must pay a testing fee to National Software Testing Labs (NSTL), which then can approve or deny the request. This allows carriers to maintain control over the applications that run on their customers' phones. BitPim is a popular open source program which can access the embedded filesystem on phones using Qualcomm MSMs via a cable or Bluetooth. It should be pointed out that signing systems are also used in J2ME, and signing is often required by Carriers and OEMs.
Qualcomm formerly developed and distributed Eudora, which it acquired in 1991 from its author Steve Dorner. Qualcomm ceased sales of Eudora on May 1, 2007 [3]. Qualcomm has committed to co-operating with Mozilla developers to develop a Eudora-like version of Thunderbird, called Project Penelope [4].
The company is also in development on a cellular/data 2-way push-to-talk voice communications program called QChat, which is proposed to be the replacement for Nextel's iDEN system as Nextel merges with Sprint; not much has been publicly released about this product.
Qualcomm also owns Flash-OFDM creator Flarion Technologies.
[edit] Further reading
- Mock, Dave (2005-02-28). The Qualcomm Equation. American Management Association. ISBN 0-8144-0818-4.
[edit] External links
- Official website
- Qualcomm CDMA Technologies (QCT)
- Qualcomm Wireless Business Solutions (QWBS)
- BREW
- BREW Gaming
- Qualcomm-Flarion Technologies page
- uiOne
- Project Penelope
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