Qualcomm announced that it has acquired San Diego-based SoftMax Inc., a market leader in noise reduction for mobiledevices. SoftMax brings multi-microphone noise suppressionand echo cancellation expertise to Qualcomm, broadening the audio and voice capabilities of the Company’s product portfolio for integration into devices such as mobile handsets, Bluetooth headsets, VoIP phones and notebook PCs.
SoftMax’s leading-edge voice algorithms for signal separation, echo cancellation and signal processing have enabled some of the latest wireless devices on the market to separate a speaker’s voice from various background noises. The result is a dramatic improvement in voice quality. Thse technology benefits have led to several key partnerships and implementations with industry-leading handset and Bluetooth headset OEMs using dual-microphone designs. SoftMax’s technology also delivers a number of additional advantages, including lower power consumption, easy implementation and minimal processing power and memory requirements.
“The acquisition of SoftMax will allow new opportunities for our customers to differentiate themselves by providing a superior level of voice quality to end users,” said Dr. Sanjay K. Jha, chief operating
officer of Qualcomm and president of Qualcomm CDMA Technologies. “With the acquisition of SoftMax, our solutions will deliver advanced voice capabilities for handsets, Bluetooth headsets and other consumer devices.”
“SoftMax has always focused on the interactions between people and technology, and our SoftMax Signal Separation platform has solved real-world problems for products such as mobile phones and Bluetooth headsets,” said Dr. Te-Won Lee, president and chief technology officer of SoftMax. “As part of Qualcomm, we now have the ability to broaden our scope and enhance speech quality for consumers around the world more than ever before.”
Qualcomm Incorporated (http://www.qualcomm.com) is a leader in
developing and delivering innovative digital wireless communications
products and services based on CDMA and other advanced technologies.
Headquartered in San Diego, Calif., Qualcomm is included in the S&P 500 Index and is a 2007 FORTUNE 500(R) company traded on The Nasdaq Stock Market(R) under the ticker symbol QCOM.