Qualcomm has established a separate wholly-owned subsidiary Qualcomm Innovation Center (QuIC), focused on mobile open source platforms.

The company said that Qualcomm Innovation Center is focused on technical innovations to mobile open source software that leverage the capabilities of latest mobile devices, with an aim to optimise platforms and applications that run on them thourgh tight hardware integration.

Qualcomm said that QuIC has brought together a group of engineers to optimise open source software with Qualcomm technology. Its engineers will focus on open source initiatives such as Linux and Webkit, and on open source operating systems such as Symbian, Android and Chrome.

The QuIC board of directors has named Rob Chandhok, senior vice president of software strategy for Qualcomm CDMA Technologies, as president of QuIC.

Mr Chandhok said: “Open source and community-driven software development is becoming increasingly important to the wireless industry and QuIC is committed to meaningful participation in these development efforts. To fulfill this commitment and to provide focus to this effort, Qualcomm has transferred experienced software engineers to QuIC.”

Qualcomm noted that open source software is helping to enhance the creativity and innovation in the connected consumer products ranging from traditional handsets and smartphones to mobile computing devices. It said that QuIC engineers have knowledge of how to hardware-optimise the performance of mobile operating systems and the software applications that run on them.