Qualcomm


Qualcomm Incorporated is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Diego, California, and incorporated in Delaware. It creates semiconductors, software and services related to wireless technology. It owns patents critical to the 5G, 4G, CDMA2000, TD-SCDMA and WCDMA mobile communications standards.
Qualcomm was established in 1985 by Irwin Jacobs and six others. Its early research into code-division multiple access wireless cell phone technology was funded by selling a two-way mobile digital satellite communications system known as Omnitracs. After a heated debate in the wireless industry, CDMA was adopted as a 2G standard in North America, with Qualcomm's patents incorporated. Afterwards, there was a series of legal disputes about pricing for licensing patents required by the standard.
Over the years, Qualcomm has expanded into selling semiconductor products in a predominantly fabless manufacturing model.

History

Early history

Qualcomm was created in July 1985 by seven former Linkabit employees led by Irwin Jacobs. Other co-founders included Andrew Viterbi, Franklin Antonio, Adelia Coffman, Andrew Cohen, Klein Gilhousen, and Harvey White. The company was named Qualcomm for "Quality Communications". It started as a contract research and development center largely for government and defense projects.
Qualcomm merged with Omninet in 1988 and raised $3.5 million in funding to produce the Omnitracs satellite communications system for trucking companies. Qualcomm grew from eight employees in 1986 to 620 employees in 1991, due to demand for Omnitracs. By 1989, Qualcomm had $32 million in revenue, 50 percent of which was from an Omnitracs contract with Schneider National. Omnitracs profits helped fund Qualcomm's research and development into code-division multiple access technologies for cell phone networks.

1990–2015

Qualcomm was operating at a loss in the 1990s due to its investment in CDMA research. To obtain funding, the company filed an initial public offering in September 1991, raising. An additional was raised in 1995 through the sale of 11.5 million more shares. The second funding round was done to raise money for the mass manufacturing of CDMA-based phones, base-stations, and equipment, after most US-based cellular networks announced they would adopt the CDMA standard. The company had in annual revenue in 1995 and by 1996.
In 1998, Qualcomm was restructured, leading to a 700-employee layoff. Its base station and cell-phone manufacturing businesses were spun-off in order to focus on its higher-margin patents and chipset businesses. Since the base station division was losing a year, profits skyrocketed in the following year, and Qualcomm was the fastest growing stock on the market with a 2,621 percent growth over one year. By 2000, Qualcomm had grown to 6,300 employees, in revenues, and in profit. 39 percent of its sales were from CDMA technology, followed by licensing, wireless, and other products. Around this time, Qualcomm established offices in Europe, Asia Pacific, and in the Americas. By 2001, 65 percent of Qualcomm's revenues originated from outside the United States with 35 percent coming from South Korea.
In 2005, Paul E. Jacobs, son of Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs, was appointed as Qualcomm's new CEO. Whereas Irwin Jacobs focused on CDMA patents, Paul Jacobs refocused much of Qualcomm's new research and development on projects related to the Internet of things. In the same year they acquired Flarion Technologies, a developer of wireless broadband Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex Access technology.
Qualcomm announced Steven Mollenkopf would succeed Paul Jacobs as CEO in December 2013. Mollenkopf said he would expand Qualcomm's focus to wireless technology for cars, wearable devices, and other new markets.

2015–2024: NXP, Broadcom and Nuvia

Qualcomm announced its intent to acquire NXP Semiconductors for $47 billion in October 2016. The deal was approved by U.S. antitrust regulators in April 2017 with some standard-essential patents excluded to get the deal approved.
As the NXP acquisition was ongoing, Broadcom made a $103 billion offer to acquire Qualcomm, and Qualcomm rejected the offer. Broadcom attempted a hostile takeover, and raised its offer, eventually to $121 billion. The potential Broadcom acquisition was investigated by the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment and blocked by an executive order from U.S. President Donald Trump, citing national security concerns.
Qualcomm's NXP acquisition then became a part of the 2018 China–United States trade war. U.S. president Donald Trump blocked China-based ZTE Corporation from buying American-made components, such as those from Qualcomm. The ZTE restriction was lifted after the two countries reached an agreement, but then Trump raised tariffs against Chinese goods. Qualcomm extended a tender offer to NXP at least 29 times pending Chinese approval, before abandoning the deal in July 2018.
In January 2021, Qualcomm appointed its president and chip division head Cristiano Amon as its new chief executive.
In January 2021, Qualcomm announced it would acquire Nuvia, a server CPU startup founded in early 2019 by ex-Apple and ex-Google architects, for approximately $1.4 billion. The acquisition was completed in March 2021, and it was announced that its first products would be laptop CPUs, shipping in the second half of 2022.
In March 2022, Qualcomm acquired the advanced driver-assistance systems and autonomous driving software brand Arriver from the investment company SSW Partners.
In June 2022, Qualcomm acquired Israeli startup Cellwize through its investment arm Qualcomm Ventures.
In August 2022, Bloomberg News reported that Qualcomm was planning to return to server CPU market based on Nuvia's product. Later that month, Arm Ltd. announced that it sued Qualcomm and Nuvia for breaching license agreements and trademark violations. Arm cited that the chip designs using Arm licenses developed by Nuvia could not be transferred to its parent Qualcomm without permission. Qualcomm indicated that its licenses with Arm cover custom-designed processors.
In January 2023, the company announced a new partnership with Salesforce to develop a connected vehicle platform for automakers using the Snapdragon digital chassis.
In May 2023, Qualcomm announced their intent to purchase Israeli fabless chipmaking company Autotalks for a reported $350–400 million. The purchase is subject to review by the Competition and Markets Authority. In March 2024, it was announced by the Federal Trade Commission that Qualcomm's proposed acquisition of Autotalks has been terminated.
In September 2023, the company announced that it had signed a contract rumored to be worth $75 million per year for its Snapdragon brand to be the primary shirt sponsor for English football club Manchester United starting with the 2024–25 season, replacing German company TeamViewer.
In October 2023, Qualcomm introduced the Snapdragon X series, a computing platform for Windows PCs which includes a custom ARM-based Oryon CPU, a GPU, and a dedicated neural processing unit.
In October 2024, Qualcomm announced that the Qualcomm-Microsoft exclusive protocol will be expired in December 25 2024, allows Windows on ARM devices can adapt ARM CPUs other than Qualcomm Snapdragon.
In October 2024, Arm Ltd. said it would cancel Qualcomm's chip design license in an escalation of the dispute over the acquisition of Nuvia. In December 2024, a U.S. federal jury ruled partially in Qualcomm's favor, finding that its designs were properly licensed under an agreement with Arm. However, the jury was deadlocked on one of three issues raised, resulting in a mistrial on that specific point. In February 2025, Arm withdrew its efforts to terminate Qualcomm's chip-licensing agreement.

2025–present: Further acquisitions

In April 2025, Qualcomm acquired Movian AI, the generative artificial intelligence unit of Vietnamese research company VinAI.
Qualcomm acquired Autotalks through its subsidiary, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc on the 5th of June 2025 for an undisclosed amount. Autotalks is an Israeli fabless semiconductor company founded in 2008, specializing in vehicle-to-everything communications.
Qualcomm agreed to acquire British semiconductor maker of high-speed wired connectivity, Alphawave IP Group, for $2.4 billion in June 2025, with the intention to expand into data centre and AI infrastructure markets.
Qualcomm acquired Arduino in October 2025, an Italian company specialising in single-board microcontrollers and microcontroller kits for an undisclosed amount. At the same time, Arduino announced the Uno Q, which uses the Qualcomm QRB2210 system on a chip, intended for AI and graphical workloads.
In December 2025, it was announced that Qualcomm had acquired Ventana Micro Systems, a company specialising in CPU designs based on the open RISC-V instruction set architecture. The acquisition is intended to enhance Qualcomm’s CPU engineering capabilities and complement its existing development of custom Oryon processors. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Wireless CDMA

2G

Early history

In mid-1985, Qualcomm was hired by Hughes Aircraft to provide research and testing for a satellite network proposal to the Federal Communications Commission. The following year, Qualcomm filed its first CDMA patent. This patent established Qualcomm's overall approach to CDMA and later became one of the most frequently cited technical documents in history. The project with the FCC was scrapped in 1988, when the FCC told all twelve vendors that submitted proposals to form a joint venture to create a single proposal.
Qualcomm further developed the CDMA techniques for commercial use and submitted them to the Cellular Telephone Industries Association in 1989 as an alternative to the time-division multiple access standard for second-generation cell-phone networks. A few months later, CTIA officially rejected Qualcomm's CDMA standard in favor of the more established TDMA standard developed by Ericsson.
At the time, CDMA wasn't considered viable in high-volume commercial applications due to the near-far field effect, whereby phones closer to a cell tower with a stronger signal drown out callers that are further away and have a weaker signal. Qualcomm filed three additional patents in 1989. They were for: a power management system that adjusts the signal strength of each call to adjust for the near-far field effect; a "soft handoff" methodology for transferring callers from one cell-tower to the next; and a variable rate encoder, which reduces bandwidth usage when a caller isn't speaking.