The future is OFDM....
eetimes.com
New Qualcomm COO shares OFDM vision
Loring Wirbel
EE Times
(12/13/2006 1:56 PM EST)
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Sanjay Jha, the former Qualcomm chip designer who served most recently as president of Qualcomm CDMA Technologies, has been named chief operating officer of parent company Qualcomm Inc. The new COO's expanded duties will include oversight of corporate research and development. Jha will also oversee Qualcomm Flarion Technologies, a broadband wireless group resulting from the acquisition of Flarion. Prior to his appointment as COO, Jha had served as a corporate-level executive vice president. He will report to Qualcomm chief executive Paul Jacobs.
Jha said his most important objective in the new corporate post is to make sure that orthogonal frequency-division multiple access intellectual property is used in a variety of places within Qualcomm, and that the company "pulls together the best OFDMA design team in the world."
Qualcomm expects OFDMA to play an important role in 802.20 mobile broadband, 1xEV-DO Rev. 3, 802.16e WiMax, and the Long Term Evolution standards being discussed by the Third Generation Partnership Project.
In fact, Jha said, he wants to make OFDMA as central to Qualcomm in the 21st century as CDMA has been in the past. Jha will work with the founders of Flarion Technologies to update proposals for the 802.20 group, but he admitted that the jury is still out as to whether the working group can recover from the "cooling-off period" IEEE mandated when group members had disputes over process last summer.
Jha said he is also excited about integrating the new 802.11 technology acquired from Airgo, in at least three realms: integrating wireless LANs and WANs for seamless roaming; applying a stripped-down 1 x 2 802.11n technology to handsets, so that mobile users can enjoy the quality-of-service advantages of 802.11n; and using 802.11n within the home for multiple streams of HDTV.
Meanwhile, Qualcomm has hired Len Lauer, former chief operating officer of Sprint Nextel, to serve as a corporate executive vice president, and president of Wireless Business Solutions, MEMS Technologies, Government Solutions and MediaFlo USA. The latter group is responsible for developing Qualcomm's mobile broadcast video system, which will compete against networks such as DVB-H. Lauer will report to Qualcomm president Steven Altman.
While Jha and Lauer have different reporting structures, Jha said he looked forward to collaborating closely with Lauer, particularly because he brings a carrier perspective to development that Qualcomm did not have before.
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