Qualcomm at 40: Here’s How We Drove Five of the Biggest Tech Revolutions

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NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESS Newswire / June 9, 2025 / Four decades of relentless innovation has transformed businesses, enriched lives and fortified society, while making key technologies accessible to people round the globe.

Written by Sascha Segan

Qualcomm has pioneered many different breakthroughs over the last four decades, but our mission remains the same: Bringing those innovations to as many people as possible.

From our original foundational work on cellular capabilities with CDMA technology to how we're positioning your favorite products to take advantage of the AI revolution, Qualcomm has - and continues to have - a major impact on your life.

Our drive to continuously innovate is marked by several critical missions we have embarked on over the last 40 years. A throughline of all those missions was to tap into technology to change the world.

And we've changed the world. A lot.

As we celebrate our 40th anniversary, here are the five big missions we took on and the revolutions they sparked.

First mission: Mobility for all

Qualcomm's first ambition was to ensure everybody had a cellphone, which in 1985 was an alien concept.

That solution came in the form of CDMA, short for Code Division Multiple Access, a radio technology that allowed more simultaneous calls on the network. This opened the door to everyone potentially getting a phone.

CDMA was a foundational building block for 3G wireless service and has been one of the core concepts in mobile networking ever since, from 4G to our current 5G and the next iteration of cellular technology, 6G.

"We saw early on that we had the ability to create technology, a technology called CDMA, that could make sure that everybody could have a phone with incredible quality and scale... that is how the company started, you know, the name of the company - Qualcomm - is quality communications. That's our very first mission," said Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano Amon during his recent keynote appearance at SXSW, where he took a lap on the history and missions the company has executed in the last 40 years.

Second mission: More than phone calls

Modern smartphones are versatile, like Swiss Army Knives, capable of handling everything from shooting Hollywood-caliber films to paying for goods like a credit card or playing immersive mobile games.

But there was a time when your cellphone was just good for one thing: Making actual phone calls.

Qualcomm saw the potential for more, starting with the PDQ-800, the first "smartphone" that combined a cellphone with the open, application-friendly OS used by Palm Pilots.