Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs '56 preaches a new wireless technology

By Lissa Harris

Wireless service providers, brace yourselves. There's a new technology on the block, said Cornell engineering graduate Irwin Jacobs '54, founder and chief executive of telecommunications giant Qualcomm, in a talk Oct. 10 on campus.

Jacobs' talk, "The Third Generation: Wireless Communications and Beyond," was the first in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Distinguished Lecture Centennial Series, which commemorates the centennial of the Ithaca section of IEEE.

Electrical and computer engineering students Zhengyun Zhang and Jian Gong speak with Qualcomm CEO Irwin Jacobs '54 at a reception Oct. 10 in Phillips Hall prior to his lecture on the next generation of wireless communications. Robert Barker/University Photography

His message to an audience of Cornell engineers in 101 Phillips Hall was: Expect major changes over the next few years in the way wireless devices, such as cellular phones, operate.

Jacobs, who helped found Qualcomm in 1985, received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Cornell in 1956. He earned his master's (1957) and doctoral degrees (1959) in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was an assistant, then an associate, professor of electrical engineering from 1959 to 1966. From 1966 to 1972, he was professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California-San Diego.

The first cellular telephone networks ran on analog technology, broadcasting each conversation over a single radio frequency. This worked fairly well in the early days of cellular service, but as the phones became more and more popular (and network busy signals more and more common), the industry was pressured to search for more efficient ways to transmit data.

Currently, most cellular phone services in the United States use a digital technology called time-division multiple access (TDMA), which divides conversations into "chunks" of digitally compressed time, allowing multiple conversations to take place on a single frequency.

Now Qualcomm is developing what Jacobs believes will be the "third generation" that will replace existing data technologies like TDMA, just as digital technologies replaced analog wireless technologies in the 1980s.

These new technologies make use of a wideband code-division multiple access (WCDMA) protocol that will allow for much faster rates of data transmission than TDMA, said Jacobs. This will permit wireless devices such as cellular phones to download information from the Internet much more quickly.

However, Jacobs believes that the main advantage of WCDMA technology will not be quicker downloads, but the ability to support many more subscribers simultaneously on a single frequency. In a market where the number of frequencies is limited, and competing wireless service providers are paying in the billions of dollars at auction for the rights to use a single 5-megahertz radio spectrum, said Jacobs, the ability to get as much use as possible out of a single frequency is critical.

Jacobs emphasized the necessity for high-tech companies to develop technology that can adapt to a rapidly changing world.

"One of the things to recognize about any technology is that it continues to evolve. Internet wireless technology is going to continue to evolve, and so there will never be one standard worldwide," he said. "The phones themselves will have to be smart enough to use whichever technology and whichever frequency band is made available by your favorite operator."