MOTOROLA TECHNOLOGIES

Motorola Inc. (NYSE: MOT) is an American, multinational, Fortune 100,[8] telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois. It is a manufacturer of wireless telephone handsets, also designing and selling wireless network infrastructure equipment such as cellular transmission base stations and signal amplifiers. Motorola's home and broadcast network products include set-top boxes, digital video recorders, and network equipment used to enable video broadcasting, computer telephony, and high-definition television. Its business and government customers consist mainly of wireless voice and broadband systems used to build private networks and public safety communications systems.
Motorola started as Galvin Manufacturing Corporation in 1928. The name Motorola was adopted in 1930, and the word has been used as a trademark since the 1930s. Founders Paul Galvin and Joseph Galvin came up with the name Motorola when the company started manufacturing car radios.[9]
Many of Motorola's products have been radio-related, starting with a battery eliminator for radios, through the first walkie-talkie in the world, defense electronics, cellular infrastructure equipment, and mobile phone manufacturing. In September 1983, the firm made history when the FCC approved the DynaTAC 8000X telephone, the world's first-only commercial cellular device. The company was also strong in semiconductor technology, including integrated circuits used in computers. Motorola has been the main supplier for the microprocessors used in Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, Color Computer, and Apple Macintosh personal computers. The PowerPC family was developed with IBM and in a partnership with Apple (known as the AIM alliance). Motorola also has a diverse line of communication products, including satellite systems, digital cable boxes and modems.

QUALCOMM TECHNOLOGIES

Qualcomm was founded in 1985 by UC San Diego Professor Irwin Jacobs (the company's current chairman), Franklin Antonio, Adelia Coffman, Andrew Cohen, AJ Read, Klein Gilhousern, Andrew Viterbi and Harvey White. Jacobs and Viterbi had previously founded Linkabit. Qualcomm's first products and services included the OmniTRACS satellite locating and messaging service, used by long-haul trucking companies, developed by Parviz Nazarian and Neil Kadisha, and specialized integrated circuits for digital radio communications such as a Viterbi decoder.
Qualcomm is the inventor of CDMAone (IS-95), CDMA 2000, and CDMA 1xEV-DO, which are wireless cellular standards used for communications. The company also owns significant number of key patents on the widely adopted 3G technology, W-CDMA. The license streams from the patents on these inventions, and related products are a major component of Qualcomm's business.
The current UMTS air interfaces are for the most part based on Qualcomm patents, and royalties from these patents represent a significant part of Qualcomm's revenue. Qualcomm's control over 3G technology and the revenue connected to licensing is a driving force behind many developments within the mobile sector.
This followed a series of patent-related lawsuits and antitrust complaints, spearheaded by Broadcom, in the US. In 2006, Broadcom started a series of patent-related lawsuits and antitrust complaints against Qualcomm to get what Broadcom regarded fair terms for access to the W-CDMA technologies. Broadcom was soon joined by Nokia and others, and complaint were also filed in the EC.[2]
The Chinese TDSCDMA 3G technology was developed primary to avoid Qualcomm licensing fees, although Qualcomm claims that the Chinese technology still infringes on many Qualcomm patents.

INTEL TECHNOLOGIES

Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC; SEHK: 4335) is the world's largest semiconductor company and the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most personal computers. Founded on July 18, 1968 as Integrated Electronics Corporation and based in Santa Clara, California, USA, Intel also makes motherboard chipsets, network cards and ICs, flash memory, graphic chips, embedded processors, and other devices related to communications and computing. Founded by semiconductor pioneers Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, and widely associated with the executive leadership and vision of Andrew Grove, Intel combines advanced chip design capability with a leading-edge manufacturing capability. Originally known primarily to engineers and technologists, Intel's successful "Intel Inside" advertising campaign of the 1990s made it and its Pentium processor household names.
Intel was an early developer of SRAM and DRAM memory chips, and this represented the majority of its business until the early 1980s. While Intel created the first commercial microprocessor chip in 1971, it was not until the success of the personal computer (PC) that this became their primary business. During the 1990s, Intel invested heavily in new microprocessor designs and in fostering the rapid growth of the PC industry. During this period Intel became the dominant supplier of microprocessors for PCs, and was known for aggressive and sometimes controversial tactics in defense of its market position, as well as a struggle with Microsoft for control over the direction of the PC industry.[5][6] The 2007 rankings of the world's 100 most powerful brands published by Millward Brown Optimor showed the company's brand value falling 10 places – from number 15 to number 25.

IBM TECHNOLOGIES

International Business Machines Corporation, abbreviated IBM and nicknamed "Big Blue", is a multinational computer technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. The company is one of the few information technology companies with a continuous history dating back to the 19th century. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and offers infrastructure services, hosting services, and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology.[3]
IBM has been known through most of its recent history as the world's largest computer company; with over 388,000 employees worldwide, IBM is the largest information technology employer in the world. Despite falling behind Hewlett-Packard in total revenue since 2006, it remains the most profitable. IBM holds more patents than any other U.S. based technology company.[4] It has engineers and consultants in over 170 countries and IBM Research has eight laboratories worldwide.[5] IBM employees have earned three Nobel Prizes, four Turing Awards, five National Medals of Technology, and five National Medals of Science.[6] As a chip maker, IBM has been among the Worldwide Top 20 Semiconductor Sales Leaders in past years, and in 2007 IBM ranked second in the list of largest software companies in the world.

BLU- RAY

Blu-ray Disc (also known as Blu-ray or BD) is an optical disc storage media format. Its main uses are high-definition video and data storage. The disc has the same physical dimensions as a standard DVD or CD.
The name Blu-ray Disc is derived from the blue laser (violet colored) used to read and write this type of disc. Because of its shorter wavelength (405 nm), substantially more data can be stored on a Blu-ray Disc than on the DVD format, which uses a red (650 nm) laser. A dual layer Blu-ray Disc can store 50 GB, almost six times the capacity of a double-dual layer DVD (or more than 10 times if single-layer).
During the high definition optical disc format war, Blu-ray Disc competed with the HD DVD format. On February 19, 2008, Toshiba — the main company supporting HD DVD — announced it would no longer develop, manufacture, and market HD DVD players and recorders,[2] leading almost all other HD DVD companies to follow suit, effectively ending the format war.
Blu-ray Disc was developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association, a group representing consumer electronics, computer hardware, and motion picture production. As of September 20, 2008 more than 850 Blu-ray Disc titles have been released in the United States and more than 500 Blu-ray Disc titles have been released in Japan.[3][4] There are expected to be over 1500 Blu-ray Disc titles released in the United States by the end of 2008.[5]

PC BOARDS

The motherboard is the main circuit board inside the PC. It holds the CPU and memory, provides expansion slots for peripherals, and, whether directly or indirectly, connects to every part of the PC.
The essential motherboard make-up includes the chipset (known as the "glue logic"), some code in ROM and the various wired interconnections between the components know as buses. The chipset is fundamental, and controls how the motherboard interacts with everything else in the system. A good chipset can be more important than the power of CPU or the amount of RAM. The ROM code includes the BIOS, which has user-changeable options for how the motherboard operates with integral and connected devices. The buses are the electrical wires that connect everything together.
Motherboard designs use many different buses to link their various components. For instance, wide, high-speed buses are difficult and expensive to produce. The signals travel at such a rate that even distances of just a few centimetres cause timing problems, while the metal tracks on the circuit board act as miniature radio antennae, transmitting electromagnetic noise that introduces interference with signals elsewhere in the system. For these reasons, design engineers try to keep the fastest buses confined to the smallest area of the motherboard and use slower, more robust buses for other parts.
In this section, the following pages focus on basic motherboard functionality and layout. You can find more information elsewhere on the site, including