[Tech] Qualcomm acquires NUVIA

One of the things that I really want to achieve during my lifetime is to be a semiconductor Research&Developer in Qualcomm. Qualcomm is a global company that makes AP, SoCs, semiconductors, and softwares. It is a fabless company and is conquering the field for a long time. Thanks to the widespread useage of 5G in 2021, its value rocketed even more. (Well, I bought some shares believing that its prices would rise, but it hasn't been going as I thought since ;( )

The news that Qualcomm acquired NUVIA has been a while, but I thought that this news might be the most adequate post for a man who dreams of being a semiconductor engineer.

Founded by MIT graduates Irwin Jacobs and Andrew Viterbi in 1985, its headquarters is located in San Diego, CA.

Qualcomm is most well known for its product SNAPDRAGON. The newest addition to this Snapdragon series is the Snapdragon 888. I believe I will cover about this topic more in the following posts.

On January 13, 2021, Qualcomm announced that it has agreed to acquire a relatively newborn start-up company Nuvia for $1.4billion. From the fact that the company has a short history, we can infer that this acquisition was aimed at capturing the talented team in Nuvia. (This reminded me of my favorite Youtuber Casey Neistat_the creator of the app Beme. The app failed big time, but CNN loved the idea and wanted to use Casey and his crew to develop their competence in the Social Media field. And guess what? Casey and his team eventually worked for CNN for years.)

Nuvia was founded back in 2019, by 3 former engineers working for Apple. The engineers are Gerard Williams III, Manu Gulati, and John Bruno.

co-founders of Nuvia

Gerard Williams has a career worthwhile paying attention to. Earning a MSEE in ECE from Missouri S&T, he worked at TI, ARM, and Apple before co-founding Nuvia. Before leaving Apple in 2019, he was a Senior Director and Chief CPU Architect. He was a crucial member designing the A7, A9, A11, A12 and A12X SoCs.

I strongly believe Qualcomm's excellence in making SoCs combined with Nuvia's world-class team designing new CPUS will be a great force together. CPU in the Qualcomm Snapdragon is designed by ARM. As the NVIDIA acquiring ARM deal is almost done, it is crucial that Qualcomm less depends on ARM. (Since Nvidia is their competitor)

Acquiring Nuvia seems to be a solution for this problem, and hopefully this works out well for Qualcomm.

Learing about Nuvia and Qualcomm made me think a lot about my career. To learn about the founders of the Company, I encountered a new SNS platform "LinkedIn". This is where people post about their careers, and their capabilities. There were tons of people that were pursuing different careers, but all of them had a similarity: they were all working damn hard for their dreams. That's when I felt like I got hitten in the head by a hammer. What have I done to achieve a dream that I always have dreamt of? Wasn't I just becoming so complacent and lazy due to my current conditions? Well, I definitely needed a motivation at this moment of time, and this was definitely it.

What I would like to cover in my next posts: SoCs(System-on-a-chip)

a tech insight by taeyounkim