Qualcomm

San Diego County’s Largest Telecommunications Employer

INNOVATIONS

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Qualcomm is the San Diego region’s largest publicly traded company and San Diego county’s largest telecommunications employer. Qualcomm’s local presence strengthens the regional economy and promotes future economic growth in San Diego and around the world.

From its inception, the company has been a principal driver of the region’s technology cluster, spurring numerous startup companies and attracting other major industry players. Qualcomm, together with its subsidiaries worldwide, is a recognized leader in the development of 5G wireless – ushering in a new era of intelligent, connected devices that’s transforming entire industries and enriching lives on a global scale.

When Qualcomm breaks through, the mobile ecosystem leaps forward and the world benefits.

 

Established in 1985, Qualcomm is a leading wireless technology innovator and driving force behind the development, launch, and expansion of technologies such as 5G (5th Generation wireless). The company invents foundational technologies that transform how the world connects, computes, and communicates.

Qualcomm attributes much of its success to its dedicated focus on research and development (R&D), on which it has cumulatively spent more than $61 billion. The company’s breakthrough inventions — including those used in its integrated platform solutions, software, and services — are the genesis for its astounding patent portfolio, numbering over 140,000 patents and patent applications.

Qualcomm could be considered an R&D engine for the mobile and wireless space, contributing significant value to a wide and ever-growing number of industries and, ultimately, billions of people around the world.

 

It began with growing the mobile ecosystem

Qualcomm revolutionized the mobile industry by making its technology inventions available to virtually any mobile device (i.e., mobile phone) manufacturer, or any company, that wanted to make and sell mobile devices. In effect, this created greater competition across the mobile industry – giving consumers more choices in brands and devices.

As of the beginning of 2020, this practice continues – helping dramatically spur innovation and growth across the mobile ecosystem and beyond. For example, Qualcomm’s breakthroughs in 3G, 4G, and 5G – coupled with advanced low-power computing – have helped make it possible for the mobile ecosystem to thrive and grow exponentially, from smartphone makers to network operators and app developers.

Today, the entire smartphone industry uses Qualcomm technology in some manner, and nearly every global network operator and mobile device marker depends on the company’s inventions to bring their products and services to realization. But now, with the world transitioning to 5G, Qualcomm envisions its wireless innovations enabling industries beyond mobile.

 

Transforming and creating new industries

Often overlooked is how vital Qualcomm and its inventions are in creating entirely new industries and business models. Without the technology foundation Qualcomm created, ride sharing, social media apps, photo sharing and streaming video on-the-go, high-precision GPS, chat services, and crowdsourced directions would not be what they are today.

Currently, Qualcomm and its subsidiaries are focused on applying the advantages of 5G wireless – speed, high throughput and low latency – to a wide range of industries. Examples include the automotive industry’s interest and testing of C-V2X (cellular-vehicle to everything) connectivity, which allows vehicles to communicate with each other, road infrastructure, and even pedestrians’ mobile devices; the development and deployment of Industrial IoT such as smart factories and warehouses that can be reconfigured and coordinated faster and with less effort; and the ever-growing number of intelligently connected (a.k.a., “smart”) consumer IoT devices people use every day.

 

Enriching lives

Ultimately, it is people who benefit from Qualcomm inventions — now and into the future. Consider the mobile phone with the potential for always-on, high-speed Internet connectivity — something that has become integral to people’s everyday lives. Capabilities such as app store operations, video streaming, audio quality, facial-recognition technology, power management, and battery efficiency are all based on inventions by Qualcomm.

With a laser focus on driving 5G forward, Qualcomm and its subsidiaries are leaning heavily on their R&D expertise and actively exploring opportunities to leverage advanced technologies such as AI (artificial intelligence), XR (eXtended Reality = Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality), and camera sensors into the integrated platform solutions making their way into more and more of the things that can benefit people everywhere.

 

Enabling the underserved

Qualcomm mobile breakthroughs span the digital divide between the wealthy and less fortunate. The company’s technologies have helped bring the internet to the unconnected, education to the unschooled, financial services to the underprivileged, and jobs to the unemployed. In fact, a forecast released in November 2019 by IHS Markit and commissioned by Qualcomm stated that 5G could start to have a positive impact on global economic growth as early as 2020 — far sooner than anyone expected — and generate a value chain supporting 22.3 million jobs within 15 years.

 

Driving the future of wireless

For decades, Qualcomm has helped propel the mobile ecosystem forward by enabling many of mobile phones’ most used and valued capabilities. The company was instrumental in driving the development and proliferation of 3G and 4G. Now, it’s building upon that history of technology leadership and doing the same with 5G, which is expected have a significantly greater impact than previous wireless generations.

5G is the technology that will make it possible for nearly everyone and everything to communicate and interact seamlessly — from automobiles and smart homes to factories and smart cities. It will make it possible for you to download a movie in less than one minute, browse the web 10 times faster than before, and experience life through untethered XR.

And that’s just the beginning. 5G will be a platform for innovation in ways we cannot yet imagine, and Qualcomm intends to be there every step along the way. Qualcomm Incorporated includes our licensing business, QTL, and the vast majority of our patent portfolio.

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, operates, along with its subsidiaries, substantially all of our engineering, research and development functions, and substantially all of our products and services businesses, including our QCT semiconductor business.

 

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