Qualcomm

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QUALCOMM Inc.
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
Industry	Wireless
Products	CDMA Chipsets BREW Eudora OmniTRACS MediaFLO QChat uiOne
Revenue	$7.09 Billion USD (2006)
Employees	9,300 (2006)
Slogan	Enabling the Wireless Industry
Website	www.qualcomm.com

QUALCOMM (NASDAQ: QCOM) is a wireless telecommunications research and development company based in San Diego, California. It was founded in 1985 by Irwin Jacobs and Andrew Viterbi, who previously founded Linkabit.

QUALCOMM is among the Worldwide Top 20 Semiconductor Sales Leaders.

QUALCOMM's first products and services included the OmniTRACS satellite locating and messaging service, widely used by long-haul trucking companies, and specialized integrated circuits for digital radio communications such as a Viterbi decoder.

QUALCOMM developed a digital cellular telephony technology based on CDMA; the first version was standardized as IS-95. It 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 now focuses on developing and licensing wireless technologies and selling ASICs that implement them.

Other QUALCOMM projects include the development of the Globalstar satellite system (a joint venture with Loral Space & Communications) and a joint venture in digital cinema with Technicolor. It developed BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless) as a platform for phones. It also maintains and sells the Eudora email program.

Contents 1 Products 2 Technical 3 Exposure to Indian Market 4 Naming Rights 5 Further reading 6 External links

[edit] Products

''OmniTRACS'' is a two-way satellite communications and geolocation 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 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 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, Sanyo, LG and Samsung for integration into CDMA cell phones.

QUALCOMM currently develops and distributes Eudora, which it acquired in 1991 from its author Steve Dorner. QUALCOMM has committed to co-operating with Mozilla developers to develop a Eudora-like version of Thunderbird, called Project Penelope.

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.

In October 2004, QUALCOMM acquired Trigenix Ltd, a mobile UI software developer, based in Cambridge, UK. After integrating their products, QUALCOMM re-branded it uiOne.

QUALCOMM also owns Flash-OFDM creator Flarion Technologies.

[edit] Technical

Qualcomm has promoted its own standard for applications in cell phones named BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless) as opposed to J2ME (aka Java Platform, Micro Edition). BREW provides stricter control for carriers which reduces the variety of available on phone applications for managing the phone content. BitPim is a popular open source program which can access the embedded filesystem on phones using Qualcomm MSMs via a cable or Bluetooth.

[edit] Exposure to Indian Market

QUALCOMM has high exposure to the Indian telecom market where its business relationship with Reliance Communication which has 21 million customers accounting for 8% of the worlds CDMA customers. A dispute originating between Reliance Communication and Qualcomm over royalty fees since April & June 2006 is estimated to cost the company US$11.7b in market capitalization.[1]

[edit] Naming Rights

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.

[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)
• BREW
• BREW Gaming
• QUALCOMM-Flarion Technologies page
• uiOne
• Project Penelope