Qualcomm buys Airgo, RFMD’s Bluetooth operations

Qualcomm today announced it has agreed to buy WLAN technologist Airgo and the Bluetooth assets of RF Micro Devices in separate deals for undisclosed sums. The two acquisitions give Qualcomm its first presence in both the local area network and personal area network wireless sectors, as well as Airgo’s significant work on IEEE 802.11n and Multiple Input/Multiple Output smart antenna technologies.

Qualcomm vice president of strategic products Mike Concannon said Qualcomm planned to maintain both companies' product line, making it a seller of current generation Wi-Fi and Bluetooth products as well as possibly integrating both companies' radio silicon technologies into its integrated MSM CDMA chipsets. In addition, Qualcomm plans to use Airgo’s technology and intellectual property in its research and development of fourth-generation radio access products, Concannon said.

“The Airgo team is very steeped in MIMO,” Concannon said. “MIMO will play a large part in our next-generation products.”

MIMO is already being used in WLAN products, including those based on the still developing 802.11n standard, and it is has a central role in new Mobile WiMAX networks, where the technologies antenna diversity is used to maintain signal strength in highly mobile or highly dense environments. While Qualcomm is one of WiMAX’s naysayers, it is using WiMAX’s core modulation scheme, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), to develop its mobile broadband systems such as the Flash-OFDM product line it inherited from Flarion, future IEEE 802.20 equipment and cellular radio access gears such as CDMA EV-DO Rev. C and UMTS Long-Term Evolution—all of which could benefit substantially from MIMO antenna systems.

Qualcomm will add Airgo’s approximately 120 employees and 70 employees from RFMD to its payrolls.