The acquisition gives Qualcomm ownership over intellectual property and engineering resources related to gesture recognition.
"Our acquisition of key technology and assets from GestureTek will strengthen Qualcomm's smartphone product portfolio and enable our customers to launch products with new and compelling user experiences," said Steve Mollenkopf, executive vice president and group president, Qualcomm, in a statement.
GestureTek, founded in 1996, holds a handful of major patents in video- and camera-enabled gesture-recognition technology. Companies like Microsoft Xbox 360, NTT Docomo phones, and Sony EyeToy pay licensing fees to use GestureTek's patents. The company also produces multi-touch products that allow multiple users to interact with a surface. Such interactive tabletop displays are often found in museums or tech stores.
It is unclear whether or not Qualcomm now owns these licenses, but in its statement the San Diego-based company said the deal does not include GestureTek's interactive display business.
Qualcomm makes a line of mobile processors called Snapdragon based on Intel's ARM architecture, and was the first to break the 1-GHz barrier. It faces stiffening competition from other high-end chipmakers like Nvidia, Texas Instruments, and Samsung.
Most recently its Snapdragon chips were found in the HTC Evo 3D launched last month.
Last November, it announced the latest version of Snapdragon, called MSM8960, which combines a a 1.2-GHz, dual-core processor with LTE, CDMA, and UMTS radios, allowing smartphones to work seamlessly across 3G and 4G networks. The first smartphones to include these chipsets are slated to launch by the end of the year.
At Mobile World Congress in February, Qualcomm announced a new generation of Snapdragon chips, based on a new processor called "Krait" that scales up to 2.5 GHz. Krait is a Qualcomm-designed processor that is compatible with, but different from the ARM Cortex-A9s used in Nvidia's Tegra 2 and TI's OMAP4.
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