Andrew Viterbi

Biography

Dr. Andrew J. Viterbi received his Bachelor and Masters degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his Ph.D. in Digital Communications from University of Southern California (USC). He taught at University of California Los Angeles and consulted for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) immediately after obtaining his Ph.D. He was a co-founder of Linkabit in 1968, a small military contractor, and co-founded Qualcomm with Irwin Jacobs in 1985. He created the Viterbi Algorithm for interference suppression and efficient decoding of a digital transmission sequence, used by all four international standards for digital cellular telephony. Qualcomm is the recognized pioneer of the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) digital wireless technology, which allows many users to share the same radio frequencies, and thereby increase system capacity many times over analog system capacity. He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, and was inducted as a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1978 and of the National Academy of Sciences in 1996.