Qualcomm acquires SoftMax

SAN DIEGO: Qualcomm Incorporated announced that it has acquired San Diego-based SoftMax Inc., a market leader in noise reduction for mobile devices. SoftMax brings multi-microphone noise suppression and 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.

“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'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, providing significant differentiation for the end product.

These 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.

“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.”