Areas of Research
The areas we explore are as exciting as they are technically challenging. Our ambition is to invent technologies that give people everywhere the opportunity to transform the way they live, discover limitless possibilities, and grow their knowledge and understanding of the world around them. We invite you to visit the research areas below, learn what they’re about, follow their progress and begin imagining the possibilities.
3G/4G Technologies
New innovations are continuously introduced to unfold hidden potential in this sphere of wireless technologies. These projects are aimed at bringing new concepts and new enhancements as an evolution to existing 3G and 4G technologies to provide higher capacities both voice and data under various deployment topologies. Qualcomm Research is also driving ground breaking innovations in small cell technologies that enable operators to meet the 1000x challenge.
3G/4G Technology Projects
Non-WAN Technologies
As the world becomes more connected, there are more wireless devices in our proximity. Applications in different devices face major challenges in finding each other in a scalable, autonomous and power efficient manner. Qualcomm Research is currently working on various projects addressing these challenges including the next evolution of local area network Wi-Fi technologies to push throughput rates beyond the Gigabit-per-second barrier.
Non-WAN Technology Projects:
Internet of Everything (IoE)
This is a rapidly evolving field that focuses on different techniques for consumers to ubiquitously connect variety of electronic devices. The applications in this area spans from connecting multiple devices at once, allowing accessible information over multiple platforms, improving existing platforms, and making advances in wireless for several segments that includes Smart Grid and Energy Management, Home and Building Automation, Asset Tracking, Health and Wellness to name a few.
Particularly worth noting is that Qualcomm Research has been making significant strides in enabling Internet of Everything in a Connected Home. An area of Research that is actively pursued in this sphere is Hybrid Networks that explores for a robust home networking solution with reliable and superior coverage in a home environment. For more information, access Hybrid Networks.
IoE Technology Project:
Application Enablers
These R&D projects at Qualcomm are continuously striving to enhance user experience and overall lifestyle of the people for coming generations. These projects are aimed at transforming mobile devices into digital companions assisting users with valuable information and insight depending on user’s current context and situation.
Application Enablers Projects:
Connectivity Enhancements
The ever-increasing growth of data and signaling traffic generated by smartphones is challenging current networks’ capacities. User experiences are also affected by poor battery performance in smartphones. There is a real need for the network as well as the devices to determine whether 3G/4G or Wi-Fi or a LTE Broadcast service or a Device-to-device communication is a better fit for the app/data that is being transferred. It has become important to make the data pipe to distinguish the type of data and the apps it is carrying, and thereby select the most optimal radio link and delivery channels among the options it has. This area of research is devoted to reap the efficiencies the way the data is utilized today in both licensed and unlicensed spectrum.
Modem Enhancement Projects:
Parallel Computing
The need to support both today’s multicore performance in addition to tomorrow’s heterogeneous computing has taken a significant importance, especially for C++ developers. Parallel computing known as Qualcomm MARE (Multicore Asynchronous Runtime Environment) is a new programming model and runtime environment that facilitates this task while exploiting the benefits of multicore performance in an efficient manner. Native code (NDK) developers on Android will find Qualcomm MARE attractive, as there are virtually no alternatives today for multicore programming libraries other than manually writing and managing threads on the Android platform. Using Qualcomm MARE vs. managing threading directly enables developers to program more efficiently and create more maintainable code, without sacrificing performance gains. Performance oriented workloads such as gaming, computer vision, and video/image processing are bound to benefit from the task based parallelism the Qualcomm MARE library enables.