Building A Bridge to the Sky

    Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of engineers helped build the broadband wireless networks that eventually made mobile computing successful. Irwin Jacobs (below in 2018) was one of them. In some ways he was the epitome of the old school EE Times’ reader, an upbeat engineer, clad in a suit and tie, who built a tractor of a business to drive his technology into global markets.

I interviewed Jacobs twice, both times long after the many techno-business battles of his career as CEO of Qualcomm. His optimism still radiated like the cherubic pink in his cheeks beneath his eyeglasses and thinning grey hair.

With his longtime collaborator and Qualcomm’s top technologist, Andrew Viterbi, Jacobs co-developed an efficient way to let many small, low-power handsets share limited airwaves. Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) was also one of the first fully digital cellular technologies, so it could ride the same rapid advances in semiconductors that drove the Intel x86 to dominance in PC processors. And the digital network helped pave the way for data services.

But pioneering work in communications theory was not enough. For a decade, Jacobs and his team clashed in standards meetings and the marketplace with an alphabet soup of rivals like TDMA and CDPD to prove their approach was superior. In 1994, Viterbi sketched out Qualcomm’s battleplan in an OEM Magazine interview with my colleague Alex Wolfe.

The company licensed its technology to the likes of Motorola and Sony who would build the handsets and other gear needed to set up CDMA networks. For a kicker, Qualcomm would also build its own slim handsets that sported eight hours of battery life. They even had plans for satellite networks.

But the company’s main products would be semiconductors. In 1994, it was on the verge of packing everything needed for CDMA into a single low-power chip with nearly a million transistors, a big milestone for the day.

Like Jacobs, Viterbi was bullish. “From a commercial standpoint, I keep getting surprised by what develops. I don’t see a limit in my lifetime,” he said.

By 2001, CDMA was a key component of the 3G standard that engineers had hammered out in endless committee meetings, and 3G cellular networks were switching on worldwide. As the technology evolved, rivals proposed next-generation variants of CDMA. Qualcomm managed to stay ahead of the pack, advancing its designs rapidly and sending dozens of representatives to standards meetings to lobby for its concepts.

The company revenues surged passed $2 billion in 1997 and more than $40 million in recent years. Qualcomm’s stock price soared and Irwin’s son, Paul, also an engineer, became CEO in 2005. The company enshrined its engineering pride in a huge wall of patents (below) at its headquarters in San Diego.

The early 2010s were a frothy time for Qualcomm. 4G networks were just taking hold, another cellular standard packed with the company’s technologies. Its added bandwidth would enable new services like Uber, mobile video and gaming; mainstream multimedia computing went mobile. 

In 2011, Qualcomm launched annual developer conferences where it would sometimes take out whole streets of downtown San Diego for after parties in local restaurants with popular rock bands in the street cavorting for the crowd. Paul Jacobs presided over the events with his reserved manner, a dry sense of humor and good looks that invited comparisons with Superman star Christopher Reeve.

As the company rose, customers and rivals complained about the high prices Qualcomm commanded for patent royalties on top of the costs of buying its chips, drawing scrutiny from regulators in the U.S, and Asia. By 2017, Qualcomm was facing government actions in China, Japan, Korea and the U.S. plus a basketful of suits around the globe with its largest customer, Apple.

The court actions, and Apple’s refusal to pay royalties, made Qualcomm the subject of a hostile takeover from Hock Tan, the acquisitive Singaporean CEO of Broadcom, a corporation named for the latest and largest chip company he had consumed. Tan offered an eye-watering $117 billion for Qualcomm.

In the chaos, Paul Jacobs tried to take the company private. The board disagreed and gave him the boot.

Despite all the drama, Irwin Jacobs remained upbeat even in 2019 testimony in an Apple suit in San Jose where he told the company’s story.

The idea for CDMA came to him while driving from L.A. to San Diego after a meeting with Hughes about a satellite contract, he said. He recounted one of its first demos conducted in February 1990 from a van loaded with gear, driving around Manhattan “in the middle of the night.”

“It’s exciting to see it go from an idea to something used by people around the world,” he said. “I still get a kick out of going to a restaurant and watching people take out their phones.”

A year earlier, I had interviewed him after he picked up a lifetime achievement award from IMEC, a small but prestigious chip research institute in Belgium.

“Wireless communications are getting better all the time, coverage is available everywhere, devices are improving, and we still have what sounds like at least two or three generations of Moore’s law ahead. Lots of good things can be done with the next 10 billion transistors,” he said.

Jacobs was an archetype of the successful engineer-turned-CEO that characterized tech in the 1990s, a breed that has all but vanished today.

“I started two companies, and I didn’t have a business plan or product in mind for either of them,” he told me. “I figured I’d get a few bright people together, come up with some ideas, and take a few chances. Back then, we didn’t go for outside financing; we used angels — and in both cases, something good happened and we had trouble keeping up with it.”

Coming soon: Before Entertainment Went Digital