Field Guide · person

Also known as: Irwin Jacobs, Irwin M. Jacobs

Irwin Jacobs (born 1933) is an American electrical engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded Qualcomm and drove the adoption of code-division multiple access (CDMA) as a commercial cellular technology, reshaping how the world’s mobile networks share the radio spectrum.1 An academic turned businessman, he twice co-founded major companies with his longtime collaborator Andrew Viterbi.

user A · code A user B · code B user C · code C sharedfrequency band receiverde-spreads
CDMA lets many users share one frequency band at once, each identified by a unique spreading code — the technology Jacobs commercialised at Qualcomm.

Life and work

Jacobs was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1933. He earned degrees in electrical engineering from Cornell and MIT, taught at MIT, and later became a professor at the University of California, San Diego. With Andrew Viterbi and Jack Wozencraft he co-authored the influential 1965 textbook Principles of Communication Engineering.1 In 1968 Jacobs and Viterbi left academia to found Linkabit, a communications engineering firm that developed satellite and coding systems.

After Linkabit was acquired, the pair — with several colleagues — founded Qualcomm in San Diego in 1985, with Jacobs as chief executive. The company initially built satellite messaging and mobile data products before betting its future on a controversial cellular architecture.

Contribution

Qualcomm’s defining bet, under Jacobs’s leadership, was that CDMA — a spread-spectrum scheme in which many callers share the same frequency band simultaneously, separated by orthogonal codes rather than by time or frequency slots — could outperform the TDMA systems then dominating digital cellular. Most of the industry was skeptical that CDMA’s capacity and power-control demands were practical. Qualcomm demonstrated otherwise, and CDMA was standardised as IS-95 (“cdmaOne”), then evolved into CDMA2000.1

CDMA’s principles — spread-spectrum coding, tight power control, soft handoff, and a capacity that degrades gracefully with load — went on to shape third-generation cellular worldwide, including the WCDMA air interface of UMTS. The mathematical backbone included the Viterbi algorithm for decoding the convolutional codes that protect the data.

Legacy

Under Jacobs, Qualcomm grew into one of the most valuable companies in wireless, earning enormous royalties from its patent portfolio and later dominating the market for cellular modem chips. He stepped down as CEO in 2005 and as chairman in 2009, and became a major philanthropist. Whether directly (in older CDMA networks) or in descendant form (the spread-spectrum ideas embedded in modern standards), the technology Jacobs championed remains woven through the way the world’s phones share the airwaves.

Sources

  1. Irwin M. Jacobs — Wikipedia, for biography, the founding of Linkabit and Qualcomm, and the commercialisation of CDMA. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

See also