The cornucopia of technology that just keeps spilling out of Qualcomm’s R&D labs has over time taken on a characteristic shape. The company draws from the depths of its technology portfolio various blocks of intellectual property that themselves represent years of development in the wide range of domains required to deliver a complete cellular experience, and assembles them in a unique combination with various adds and tweaks to optimize for a particular related function, finally slathering on a layer of software to make that function easily available to companies implementing it.
In the case of an announcement last week, that function is audio. Qualcomm is best known as a supplier of cellular modems, but it also has an important business in mobile processors. These complete systems on a chip (SoCs) are designed to handle all of a cell phone’s functions, one of which is audio. Those who use their phones for nothing but texting and social media may have forgotten that cell phones were once entirely for talking and listening. The first data type that went over cell phones was voice audio.
Naturally, it was important to get the quality right going in both directions. But of nearly equal concern was power consumption. The first law of mobile communications has always been: use as little power as possible for any given effect, for otherwise battery life will quickly…
