Qualcomm Technology Licensing
Through significant technology contributions to standards organizations and global support of commercialization of new technologies, Qualcomm’s flexible and transparent licensing program promotes rapid technology advancement, competition, and growth across the ecosystem—empowering our licensees to create products the world loves.
5G intellectual property licensing
With over 110 5G licensing agreements, Qualcomm’s industry-leading, highly valuable, and fundamental 5G innovations are the most widely licensed in the industry—including multiyear patent license agreements with every major handset OEM. We invented fundamental technologies that make 5G work, enabling 5G’s speed, low latency, reliability, capacity, and expansion to new industries. In fact, our portfolio of inventions includes wireless innovations that began years ahead of the industry—early, foundational inventions with broad geographic coverage resulting in an unmatched global 5G licensing program.
R&D leadership
Qualcomm is the world’s leading wireless technology innovator and the driving force behind the development, launch, and expansion of 5G. Since our founding, we have invested nearly $66B in R&D, including over 20 percent of annual revenue since 2006. For decades, our inventors have been solving complex, systems-level problems and pioneering research that is years ahead of the industry, often a decade in advance of commercialization—which has been continuously recognized, receiving awards from IEEE, the White House, the European Patent Office, and many more.
Enormous economic value
Mobile has become the largest technology platform in human history. With more than 8 billion connections, it is estimated that in 2019 mobile technology created about $4.8 trillion dollars of global economic value* – more than the GDP of Germany. With 5G, we expect that this will increase further as foundational cellular technology creates even more value for the industry and society overall.
Unmatched patent portfolio
Our industry-leading patent portfolio represents the collective efforts of our world-class engineers. Our portfolio includes foundational cellular essential patents that led 3G, 4G, and 5G, respectively, and valuable implementation inventions that make cellular commercialization viable. We have also developed valuable leading IP across a number of areas foundational to mobile experiences—including RF, position location, processing platform, video compression, imaging, computer vision, voice and audio technologies, Wi-Fi, and AI. Our unmatched portfolio of inventions includes over 140,000 granted and pending patents across more than 100 countries and jurisdictions.
Our approach to intellectual property licensing.
Our global licensing program enables us to share our world-leading inventions with licensees so they can focus on providing the best possible products to their customers. Across more than 300 licensing agreements, over 14B devices have benefitted from licensing Qualcomm’s patents. Our approach is inclusive, flexible, and efficient—encouraging innovation, fostering healthy competition, and continuously driving the advancement of the ecosystem.
Qualcomm enables opportunity across the mobile ecosystem.
Qualcomm Technology Licensing supports significant activities that help both licensees and the mobile ecosystem grow. We partner with the industry to accelerate the development of 5G, sharing core technologies across the global ecosystem—including wireless carriers, device makers, infrastructure vendors, and service and application developers. With licensees, we provide technical design support and dedicated labs to support differentiation, time-to-market, and market entry. We provide technical training across the ecosystem, including more than 22,000 5G sessions since 2017—and we work with operators and venue owners worldwide to implement new technologies and optimize their networks. We also run startup incubation programs that nurture the implementation of advanced technologies, and we educate our licensees on how to protect their inventions through patenting.
Learn more about our IP and IP licensing.
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