expanding cornucopia of smartphones, tablets, laptops, and other mobile computing devices.
The company also has been working to spur demand even higher by stepping up its technology innovation in its core areas of expertise: wireless computer processing units, graphics processing units, digital signal processors, modems, network connectivity, sensors, and displays. “If you look at it, there is just a lot of stuff happening in every one of these categories,” Jacobs said. “We’re not just waiting, we’re going out and driving innovation in these sectors.”
Qualcomm has spent about $20 billion on R&D over the past 10 years, which has helped the company claim the lead in application processors, along with the CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, radio frequency chips, and 3G/4G/LTE technology, according to Steve Mollenkopf, Qualcomm’s president and chief operating officer (COO).
Mollenkopf says he considers fiscal 2012 the year when Qualcomm began to pull away from the pack in wireless chip design, saying, “that’s because we showed the industry a really differentiated chip.”
Qualcomm views its “system on a chip” approach as a competitive advantage, because the company controls development of
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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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