It is in the extreme south of California, facing the Mexican border, that Qualcomm holds most of its activity. The smartphone chip giant has set up its headquarters and main laboratories in sunny San Diego, which we were able to visit in part.
Its stronghold extends over several hectares, on the northern outskirts of the city, and concentrates 13,000 collaborators out of the 41,000 employees that it has worldwide.
Alone in his kingdom
Although Google, Apple and Amazon eventually opened offices in this listed city and the biotechnology sector is developing there, Qualcomm is still an exception.
Unlike San Francisco, San Diego remains more known for its beaches and the historic presence of the US Navy than for its ecosystem of start-ups. Even on campus, it’s hard to forget the omnipresence of the military with their fighter planes flying by several times a day.
Qualcomm therefore finds itself the only big tech company in its kingdom. It is quite naturally in his heart that he chose to organize his annual 5G Summit to celebrate the return to face-to-face of the event this month of May. “Welcome to our beautiful city of San Diego”greeted his charismatic boss, Cristiano Amon, at the opening.
A stadium to the glory of Snapdragon
The company’s footprint in the city does not end there. In September will take place the inauguration of the American football stadium Snapdragon, named after the famous suite of Soc. There is even a Qualcomm Way that runs along the site since the stadium was simply called Qualcomm before the works!
All this, without counting the social works or educational and cultural places that the company finances or which are supported by the main founder of the company, Irwin Jacobs, now retired.
Originally there was Irwin Jacobs
If the headquarters is installed at a respectable distance from Silicon Valley, in the second metropolis of the State, it is because of him, Irwin Jacobs (third from the right in the photo below).
A young professor of electrical and computer engineering at MIT, he was called upon in the 1960s to strengthen the University of San Diego (USCD). After a first entrepreneurial experience, legend has it that it was from his living room that he created Qualcomm with six other engineering friends in 1985. The small group chose this name because it is a summary of QUALity COMMunications.
Today, the company designs and distributes wireless connectivity solutions for consumer terminals and operator equipment. More specifically, it provides processors, modems, all the radio components between the modem and the antenna, as well as the software that goes with them. But she is fabless. So you won’t find a manufacturing plant at its San Diego headquarters.
The Qualcomm campus is divided into several parts. On one side are the research labs where we have travelled, on the other, the head office with the administrative, marketing or sales departments. No spectacular and grandiose design like that of Apple Park. No trace of fantasy either, like at the Googleplex which proudly displays colorful Android figurines. Beige, gray or blue, here the buildings compete in sobriety. And no place for poetry with names of buildings that are hopelessly efficient. Welcome to Building M, O, or T!
Originally, Qualcomm was essentially a research center living off contracts with the Department of Defense or the government. And since these beginnings, it has always been engineers who have directed it. The last two CEOs, Steve Mollenkopf and Cristiano Amon, are no exception to the rule. This is not insignificant and is felt even in the functional logic of the campus.
The impressive patent wall
Behind the apparent banality of all these buildings, some are still worth a detour. The first is Building N. It welcomes employees for training sessions or outside visitors for demonstrations.
At the reception, you cannot miss an impressive wall of patents whose reputation has already traveled the world. It is made up of 1,395 patents, only a very small part of the total filed by Qualcomm since its inception.
This patent wall is far from being anecdotal. On the one hand, it has uplifting virtues for all employees who pass by. On the other hand, it sums up its business model well. The company not only derives its income from the products it sells, but also from patents filed on essential technologies for manufacturers of smartphones, or other connected products. “Qualcomm was founded on the idea that we will try to be innovative”, liked to repeat Irwin Jacobs. Its wealth is its patents, which condemns it to devote substantial resources to research and innovation.
A small museum retraces its history
Near the patent wall, Qualcomm has also built a small museum to retrace its history. Again, no excess, even if the company is proud to align all the technologies to which it has contributed in almost forty years of existence. His first masterstroke was the development of the two-way Omnitracs satellite communication system, which is still used today.
Omnitracs’ success funded the development of CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access), a spectrum-efficient radio transmission technology. No need to occupy a frequency for each call. The information transfers can take place simultaneously and are identified by codes. CDMA eventually imposed itself on the entire planet in 1999 and was integrated into 3G, 4G, then 5G. A real pension.
500 engineers dedicated to 5G
Today, Qualcomm highlights its advances in the field of 5G, a market in which it is the leader. He is now actively working to develop the standard. Consider that 500 engineers are dedicated exclusively to this generation of mobile telephony on its campus! Unfortunately, we were unable to enter the holy of holies, the Research Center, which hides its greatest industrial secrets.
But we were able to browse the Building BC. A sort of huge modular hangar dedicated to experimenting with his discoveries coming out of the labs. Here, connectivity tests are carried out between a base station and a terminal in a space covered with pyramidal foam reproducing outdoor conditions.
There, young researchers prepare the factories of the future with a robotic arm connected to a production line. We also come across robots whose routes are tracked to improve precise positioning indoors.
We end up accessing the roof of the building, where Qualcomm is performing outdoor communication tests. A little further down, you can see the runway reserved for connected drones which are used when the US Army is not flying over its campus.
From the roof, we scan the entire Qualcomm campus, which has about twenty buildings in total. It has grown over the years, spanning the roads and nibbling a rural landscape where mountains and canyons can be seen in the background.
The strategy of diversification
A territory crossed by contrary influences. We find ourselves in turn disheveled by the maritime gusts of the nearby Pacific coast and enveloped by the hot and dry breath coming from the desert to the East. A bit like Qualcomm, caught between two two in the mobile market, where it seemed immovable. He found himself jostled at home by the giant Apple, which will do without its chips in its iPhones from 2023. And he was dethroned from his place as world leader by the Taiwanese Mediatek, which is more volume than him on the smartphone processor segment.
It now relies on the flexibility of its Snapdragon platform to diversify. It is no longer just a matter of addressing mobile terminals but also cars, augmented reality glasses, virtual reality headsets, as well as factory robots and a multitude of connected objects. “We are entering a new era of smart connected products”wanted to reassure Cristiano Amon in front of a crowd of analysts at the 5G Summit.
It is still necessary that the manufacturers follow and that the users find a use for it.