Qualcomm history

Finally, CMOS ASIC technology had caught up, ending the need for hundreds of TTL chips and exotic measures like ECL. Qualcomm had its first chip design ready in September 1987: the Q1401, a 17 Mbps, 80 state, K=7, rate ½ decoder.

By January 1988, the system began limited operational testing on a cross-country drive.

Jacobs reached out to the CTIA to present the CDMA findings and after an initial rebuff got an audience at a membership meeting in Chicago in June 1989.

On July 31, 1990, Qualcomm published the first version of the CDMA specifications for industry comments – the Common Air Interface.

On August 2, NYNEX announced it would spend $100M to build “a second cellular telephone network” in Manhattan by the end of 1991, mostly to provide time for frequency allocation and base station construction. $3M would go to Qualcomm to produce CDMA phones.

Licensee number five in April 1992 was none other than Nokia, the climax of a year and a half of negotiations directly between Jacobs and Jorma Ollila.

By 1993 Jacobs was being anointed by Fleet Owner magazine as "The Man Who Changed Trucking."

OmniTRACS, meanwhile, had increased its customer base to 425 and by the end of 1994 was processing 2.5 million trucking messages and position reports every day on 13,000 OmniTRACS units in 25 countries.

On February 1, 1995, Qualcomm announced the Q5257 MSM2 with its Q186 core in a 176-pin QFP, along with the Q5312 integrated Analog Baseband Processor (BBA2) replacing 17 discrete chips in an 80-pin QFP. Those two chips formed most of a CDMA phone – such as the QCP-800 announced the next day.

Qualcomm's equipment joint venture with Sony received an $850 million order for handheld phones in 1996, and by mid-year a Qualcomm/Sony truck departed from San Diego for the East Coast with thousands of PCS phones ready for delivery to Primeco customers.

Reducing power was the objective of the MSM2300, announced in March 1997.

Already in progress when the ARM deal became public, the MSM3000 was announced in February 1998 with a core change to ARM7TDMI. It had other enhancements including the SuperFinger demodulator for faster data transfers up to 64 Kbps, and enhanced sleep modes.

A patent infringement lawsuit ensued, with the two companies reaching a settlement in March 1999.

By 2000, Qualcomm had grown to 6,300 employees, $3.2 billion in revenues, and $670 million in profit.

2002 – Qualcomm-driven technologies gain traction around the world

The MSM6500 finally sampled nearly two years later, fabbed in 0.13 micron, packaged in a 409-pin CSP.661,662 2003 marked the start of leadership change.

Started in the fall of 2004, Hexagon applied three techniques to deliver performance at low power: Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW), multithreading to reduce L2 cache miss penalties, and a new instruction set to maximize work per packet.

Irwin Jacobs stepped down as CEO of Qualcomm on July 1, 2005 – the 20th anniversary of its founding – moving into the role of Chairman.

Taking the opening, Qualcomm introduced the first Gobi chipset in October 2007, with the 65nm MDM1000 for connecting netbooks and similar nonphone devices to the Internet using EV-DO or HSPA over existing 3G cellular networks.

In September 2008, the T-Mobile G1, built by HTC, was the first phone released running Android – on a Qualcomm MSM7201A chip.

In June 2010, the third-generation Snapdragon MSM8260 and MSM8660 featured two Scorpions running at 1.2 GHz paired with the Hexagon V3 at 400 MHz, plus a higher performance Adreno 220 GPU. Packages were getting larger; the MSM8x60 came in a 976-pin, 14x14mm nanoscale package (NSP).

When Mobile World Congress (MWC) convened in February 2011, Qualcomm had two major moves up its sleeve for announcement.

Qualcomm announced Steven Mollenkopf would succeed Paul Jacobs as CEO in December 2013.

At MWC 2015 in March, the big reveal was the Snapdragon 820 with “Kryo”, Qualcomm’s new 64-bit ARMv8-A CPU core design.

Qualcomm announced its intent to acquire NXP Semiconductors for $47 billion in October 2016.

The deal was approved by United States antitrust regulators in April 2017 with some standard-essential patents excluded to get the deal approved by antitrust regulators.

Qualcomm's NXP acquisition then became a part of the 2018 China–United States trade war.

NUVIA was a server CPU startup founded in early 2019 by ex-Apple and ex-Google architects.