U.S. manufacturer of wireless communications, electronic systems, and semiconductors.
The company, headquartered in Schaumburg, Ill., was founded in 1928 in Chicago by brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin as the Galvin Manufacturing Corp. In 1930 the company began selling a low-cost automobile radio, called the Motorola. In 1947 the company changed its name to Motorola, and the next year it introduced a television set. Motorola licensed the design for transistors from Bell Laboratories in 1952 and began to sell them to other manufacturers in 1956. By 1962 the company had more than 4,000 different electronic components on the market. In 1974 Motorola released its first microprocessor for sale to computer makers. In 1993 the company developed the first consumer RISC (reduced-instruction-set computing) chip, the PowerPC, with IBM Corp. and Apple Computer, Inc. In the market for embedded microprocessors
ubiquitous in such common items as kitchen appliances, pagers, video games, and handheld personal computers
Motorola became the leading manufacturer. Motorola was also a leader in the development of cellular telephone systems. In 1989 the company introduced the MicroTAC flip phone, which quickly became an international status symbol.