<<Most of the work on CDMA was done by its predecessor
company, Linkabit, headed by Jacobs and Viterbi, to whom most of the early key
CDMA patents were assigned. Linkabit was sold to Interdigital Communications,>>
Not sure your 100% correct here. The Interdigital stuff at Linkabit was TDMA stuff, doing on the Ultraphone project. Interdigital got litle or no info or rights to CDMA from that relationship. I think alot of the new ideas on CDMA were done after that relationship.
True story about the early days at QCOM (circa 1987). OMNITracs was under development and everyone was struggling to get the first system designed and built to meet the customer deadlines. Our marketing people came back and told us that the one way system we had was a good design, but that if we did not have a two way design, we would never be sucessful. Doing one way broadcast tothe trucks using CDMA was pretty strieghtforward, as the Satellite can blast out 25 W and the trucks can all listen and decode this, but nobody had ever designed a way to have a truck send back a 14 GHz 1W signal to a satellite 25,000 miles in space while the truck was moving. This meant going from the simple antenna to a tracking focused antenna.
Jacobs and Viterbi then called all the top people in the company into a room (about 10-12 that day out of a total of about 75) and decided that they must get the entire system designed from both a systems and practical point of view. The meeting lasted about 8-10 hours. During that meeting, they designed the tracking antenna used today on the OMNITracs, along with quite a few patents. In the space of 10 hours, they had something like 20-22 patent applications of which 13 were allowed by the patent office, and of which Dr Jacobs and/or Viterbi has a very big hand in about 7-8. Among these were a rotating PIN diode Antenna pickup without connectors, a reverse link waveform design to support 10,000 trucks on a single backhaul link, Antenna tracking algorithms. It was a very interesting day in the history of the company and one which turned it around with it's very first big product. For those interested, go pull a list of patents from the copmpany with "applied for" dates in 1987 and early 1988. |
