Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs recently sat down with Bloomberg Businessweek’s Charlie Rose to discuss the past, present and future of mobile computing. According to Jacobs, 5 billion smartphones will be sold worldwide between now and 2016 – and none of that would be possible without innovative thermal management technologies.
Jacobs reminisced about the early days of mobile computing and how Steve Jobs, the late co-founder, CEO and visionary that built the Apple empire, served as its catalyst. Now, the future potential of such personal electronic devices is staggering.
“Then I look out even farther into the future and I say, boy, this wireless technology is going to be an enabling technology for a lot of other industries,” he told the news source. “And one of the areas that we’re really focused on is [healthcare]. The idea is that the phone is going to sit at the center of a web of sensors that you’ll have on your body. You may actually even have them inside your body.”
Jacobs went on to offer some hints at a new technology being worked on that would actually place sensors inside a human being’s blood stream and provide early warnings of possible health complications like heart attacks.
Whatever the future holds, Jacobs is right about at least one thing. Wireless technology is indeed an enabling technology. The paradigm-shifting innovations that have been made in the development of semiconductors and the soldering solutions that allow them to be pack a powerful punch into such small devices affects virtually every industry today.
Cutting-edge thermal management of electronics allows them to deliver unparalleled computing power in the palm of one’s hand. As leading minds in the industrial sciences continue to make breakthroughs, wireless and mobile technology will not only continue to enable advancements in existing markets, but likely lead to the creation of entirely new industries.