Kyocera, Qualcomm

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. more...

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.

Products

OmniTRACS is a location 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 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, and Samsung for integration into CDMA cell phones.

Qualcomm designed and currently maintains and distributes Eudora (e-mail client).

The company is also in development on a cellular/data 2-way 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.

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