My Summer Internship

I started two weeks ago as an Engineering Intern at Qualcomm. I was assigned to the Office of the Chief Scientist's (OOTCS) Advanced Research and Development team which is a small group of about 100 people working on various projects. The difference between this group and the much larger Corporate R&D group is that my group works on new technologies that have been specifically requested by a customer.

My team is known as the GMSA (GeoSynchronous Mobile Satellite Application) team and consists of only around 10 or 20 guys as far as I can tell. Their task is to alter the CDMA 1xEV-DO chipset to incoorporate signals from satellite networks as well as terrestrial networks. In addition, they are using the new CDMA VoIP (Voice over IP) technology which takes advantage of the fact that data rates are faster than voice rates, and will send all voice data using IP (Internet Protocoll - as Skype does). This technology was requested by companies SkyTerra and TerreStar as described in the articles below.

TerreStar, Qualcomm collaborate on comms tech

SkyTerra’s Mobile Satellite Ventures, ICO Global Communications, and Qualcomm Sign Groundbreaking Technology Agreement Enabling First-Ever Integration of Satellite Communications into Mass Market Cellular Handsets and Devices

So far I have only been assigned small tasks. Mostly, I have added improvements to their internal website that organizes all of the Base Station server components, and all configuration profiles that allow them to test the new technology. My long term assignment is to edit Qualcomm's testing software called QXDM to incoorporate for this new CDMA 1xEV GMSA technology. This software will be used by my team to test the phones and networks, and will be provided to the customer as their way of troubleshooting the networks as well. I'm still waiting for the source code for this program, which I will hopefully get next week and we be able to start making changes.