Irwin Jacobs

Irwin Mark Jacobs was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1933 and earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University before completing his master's and doctoral degrees at MIT under the supervision of Claude Shannon, one of the founding figures of information theory. Jacobs joined the University of California San Diego faculty in 1966 and co-authored the foundational textbook Principles of Communication Engineering. He co-founded Linkabit Corporation in 1968 before establishing Qualcomm in 1985. Widely regarded as one of the most consequential figures in the history of wireless communications, Jacobs served as Qualcomm's CEO from its founding until 2005 and as Chairman until 2009.

Irwin Jacobs is the primary architect of Qualcomm's founding vision and strategic direction through its most formative decades. His academic background in information theory provided the intellectual foundation for Qualcomm's commitment to CDMA technology, while his entrepreneurial temperament — developed through the earlier Linkabit venture — gave him the organizational skills to transform a research-oriented startup into a commercially successful enterprise. Jacobs served as Qualcomm's Chairman and CEO from 1985 through 2005, overseeing the company's initial public offering, its CDMA commercialization, and its decisive early-2000s pivot to pure chip design and patent licensing. Under his leadership, Qualcomm grew from seven founders sharing office space in a former San Diego restaurant to a multi-billion-dollar global technology company. He was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 1994 and remains one of the most celebrated figures in San Diego's technology ecosystem, having donated hundreds of millions of dollars to local educational and civic institutions.