Founder Profile
Irwin Jacobs
Last reviewed: October 2026 · By Swet Parvadiya
Who is Irwin Jacobs?
Irwin Jacobs is a founder of Qualcomm Inc., which was founded in 1985 with Andrew Viterbi.
- Company founded
- Qualcomm Inc.
- Founded
- 1985
- Co-founders
- Andrew Viterbi
Background
Irwin Jacobs earned his Ph.D. from MIT and worked in electrical engineering, digital signal processing and wireless communications. He was an academic and had already founded one company before Qualcomm.
Founding Story
Irwin Jacobs is an American electrical engineer who co-founded Qualcomm and was its first CEO. He had been a professor at UC San Diego and had co-founded Linkabit. Jacobs saw the capacity limits of the cellular networks of the time, and in 1985 he started Qualcomm with Andrew Viterbi. The company developed CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access), a technology that lets far more digital data travel over a wireless network. CDMA became the basis of Qualcomm's position in mobile chipsets.