Qualcomm Founder Dr. Irwin Mark Jacobs
„It took us 9 years to enter the chinese market“
Fortsetzung des Artikels von Teil 1
„You are a liar“
DESIGN&ELEKTRONIK: You invented CDMA at a highway drive? Wonderful ! Can you provide a second story of this kind?
Dr. Jacobs: Indeed, I can. At my former company Linkabit we came up with the idea to use a RISC processor before anybody else – this was back in the mid seventies. The reason was the hardware was so expensive at this time, we didn’t have the ICs from today obviously. So we tried to keep it simple. We got a job at the Air Force, part of a frequency hopping system, which was controlled by an encryption. And the Air Force specified the encryption by giving a book of hardware, how to build the hardware, putting in the key. The time limitation was 5 Milliseconds. It was very expensive to do. Any case, flying home I was thinking how can I do this on a RISC processor? I came back, implemented it, they gave us some test cases, and it was working properly.
When we met with a large company we were competing with for the manufacturing contracts, the program manager came to me and said that there are some rumors that you are doing this in software. My answer was, yes we are! And then there came up new requirements regarding the encryption: the allowed time was just 3 Milliseconds instead of 5 Milliseconds. With the hardware solution they couldn’t any longer fulfil this requirement, but with the software we could do it! (laughing) So he said „You are a liar“ !
DESIGN&ELEKTRONIK: You are famous for supporting Universities and donating hundereds of millions of dollars. Nevertheless, the ongoing lack of talents is not only hurting Silicon valley companies. How to overcome this challenge, which obviously is slowing the innovation?
„We have to get kids more interested in technology“
Dr. Jacobs: You are right, we still need very well trained talents. The growth of both of my companies Linkabit as well as Qualcomm was not limited by financials, but by finding the right people. So I decided to establish a high school system called „High Tech High“ and my older son [3] is still the chairman since it startet. The idea is to use project based education to get the kids more interested in technology and more innovative, working peer-to-peer in groups together. There are about 5.000 students currently around many places within the United States, furthermore we are providing teacher trainings for teachers coming for graduate programs from around the world. The kids make their decisions around the age of 9 to 11 to prefer science, physics, math or not. So you have to reach them early and to motivate them.
Another initiative I startet in my time at Qualcomm was to bring in kids from 9 to 11 for a full day and to educate them which kind of jobs a high tech company like Qualcomm is offering for all types of backgrounds and how to prepare yourself for that. They can e.g. work on robotics and this was a fun thing, too. So, yes, education is extremly important.
- „It took us 9 years to enter the chinese market“
- „You are a liar“
- „My wife and myself setup an innovation institute at a ‚less standard university‘“
- „When you step away, you step away“
- „Medical, Automotive or Education, everything is impacted“
- References
