Semiconductor giant Qualcomm Inc. opened a research and development office in Folsom to house the remote workers it already had in the region and to add to its local workforce, said Kedar Kondap, senior vice president and general manager of Qualcomm's compute and gaming division.
Qualcomm has about 20 to two dozen employees in the region already, though its executives wouldn't say exactly how many. It plans to double that number, said spokesman Brandon Cheung.
"We want to grow the talent here," Kondap said, adding that the employees in the Folsom area are excited to have a home office where they can work and collaborate.
"We have great technical talent here in Folsom," said Folsom City Councilmember YK Chalamcherla.
The office, in a flexible rental office space on Iron Point Road, is in the same area as local offices of other major chipmakers Intel Corp., Micron Technology Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.
Qualcomm (Nasdaq: QCOM) announced the new office in a news conference on Friday with Folsom Vice Mayor Sarah Aquino and officials from the Greater Sacramento Economic Council.
San Diego-based Qualcomm was founded in 1985. It's developed foundational technology for wireless communications, for which it holds many licenses. It also develops and produces software and integrated circuit hardware that enable voice and data communications.
The company employs 50,000 worldwide. Its latest technology push is its Snapdragon 8 microchip, which allows for on-device processing rather than having to connect to the cloud. It has applications for artificial intelligence and also faster intelligent interaction with the users of many softwares, without having to access the cloud, Kondap said. That on-device capability is available for phones and starting this year for PCs.
"Everything in semiconductors is talent driven, and the message here is that Sacramento has this talent," said Troels Adrian, a vice president with GSEC.
The Sacramento market, and especially Folsom, has access to specialized software and hardware engineers and chip architects who develop technologies for everything from phones and cars to AI.
The new Qualcomm offices are just down the road from the Folsom campus of Intel (Nasdaq: INTC), which has done research and development in Folsom for 40 years. That campus has 1.5 million square feet of office space and around 5,000 employees.
Micron (Nasdaq: MU) has had engineering and R&D operations in Folsom since it acquired Numonyx, a company spun out of Intel, in 2010.
Those research and engineering operations were joined in recent years by the Folsom office of Tokyo-based Kioxia, a memory chip company spun out of Toshiba Corp. five years ago, and Samsung's research office that opened at the end of last year in Folsom.
Another local chip R&D shop is nearby in Rancho Cordova, where flash memory company Solidigm has its U.S. headquarters, Solidigm was spun out of Intel in 2021 when South Korean chip company SK hynix bought Intel's flash memory business for $9 billion.
Qualcomm is advertising for positions in Folsom ranging from game developers and software developers to graphics processing unit, or GPU, engineers. Salaries range from $130,000 to $284,000 annually.
Coincidentally or not, all the new R&D offices in Folsom are on Iron Point Road. Intel’s campus is technically on Prairie City Road, but its cross street is Iron Point.
All those shops are research and design operations. The only chip manufacturing factory in the region will be a new state-of-the-art Bosch factory in Roseville. In the fall of last year, German manufacturer Bosch paid $42.4 million for an old factory where it plans to invest $1.5 billion to install fabrication equipment to make silicon carbide chips for electric vehicle and electric current control applications.
