Klein Gilhousen

As a cofounder and senior vice president of technology for Qualcomm Inc., Klein Gilhousen is also one of its longest running employees. Although Qualcomm’s headcount and technology portfolio have grown exponentially in the past 20 years, Gilhousen says his day-to-day work hasn’t varied much.

“I would say that the main thing I do is what I’ve always done: catch ideas,” says Gilhousen, who has worked remotely from his home in Montana since 1991.

The 63-year-old says there’s no particular formula for nabbing those ideas, but that his process involves staying on top of various technical issues and watching out for potential problem areas. The search for solutions often results in innovation, he says.

It was that kind of problem solving that led Gilhousen and his colleagues to take spread spectrum code division multiple access, or CDMA, from a means of private military communication to a commercially viable technology platform for use by cellular phones and mobile satellites.

Former CEO Irwin Jacobs conceived the notion that CDMA could be something more, says Gilhousen. “Twenty years ago, the conventional wisdom was that CDMA was the worst way to do access. We all thought that,” he says.

Yet given the impetus by Jacobs, Gilhousen invented a way to increase the capacity of CDMA, by means including demodulation of the signal. When Qualcomm first introduced the concept to the industry in 1989, company inventors hypothesized CDMA could have 20 times higher capacity than analog FM cellular systems. Qualcomm’s first CDMA systems were probably 10 to 12 times better than analog, says Gilhousen. He suspects that today’s version of CDMA has 30 to 40 times greater capacity.

“We found that we could do a lot of things with CDMA that made it a lot better — more than anyone thought possible,” says Gilhousen. “From there, once you know that you’re really onto something, then it can become a commercial reality and that’s a different set of problems.”

Gilhousen acknowledges that technologies out there threaten to unseat CDMA in the marketplace, but he doubts they can improve on CDMA’s capacity or efficiency. “We’ve been working on the theoretical underpinnings of those arguments. It might be possible, but I haven’t seen anything that has convinced me yet.”

Gilhousen doesn’t expect Qualcomm can continue to grow at the rapid pace it has for the last two decades. He looks at the company’s growth in terms of how many times it has doubled in size, and even the number of times it has spun off or sold chunks of the company. That pace has allowed Qualcomm to vastly expand its business and financial resources, but would morph the company into something else altogether if continued, he says.

In the coming years, Gilhousen foresees any number of paths for technological advances, from more interactive two-way mobile communication to a sort of “graffiti language” for voice recognition technology. But he stops short of predicting the future. He doesn’t want to reveal the details of his own Qualcomm-proprietary ruminations, and he doesn’t suppose anyone really knows what lies ahead.

“You never know what it’s going to be until you think of it.”