The Veteran

Luis Pineda: All the stops on his resume have one thing in common: semi-conductors. Recently named Qualcomm's VP of product management. Pushing messages about CDMA's growth, the freedom of being a pure chipmaker and why Qualcomm isn't afraid of Nokia.

I'm an old man. I've been at Qualcomm since 1997, and my career here has been entirely with our CDMA technologies division. I was on the teams that focused on 2G CDMA and then 3G CDMA. Now it's not just CDMA, but UMTS. We're working with partners, customers and the industry to be a source of information about where wireless technology is going next.

Before Qualcomm, I worked at IBM Microelectronics, where I worked on their GSM chips. I had worked at Comquest, which was bought by IBM. I worked at Brooktree on multimedia chips. I worked at AMCC. Before that I worked at Unisys Semiconductor, which was bought by Conexant.

At Brooktree I met Sanjay Jha [president of Qualcomm's CDMA Technologies Group]. I joined the marketing group with Johan Lodenius [former vice president of product management, now senior vice president of European business relations], and Johan and I worked hand-in-hand with Sanjay on marketing CDMA chipsets. Now Johan has moved to Europe to promote UMTS and BREW there, and I've taken over for him here.

These days, the Asian market is driving our innovation for the consumer wireless market. Meanwhile, the European market has traditionally been GSM and GPRS, but now CDMA — through UMTS — is on their road map. We have our second-generation UMTS chip out and our third one in the works. Next year is the year for UMTS.

There absolutely were benefits to our ability to innovate when we sold our handset and infrastructure businesses in 1999. The sales allowed us to focus on our core competency and innovate more directly for the needs of our customers. Our contribution to the industry became bigger.

Now Nokia is developing CDMA and UMTS chipsets. We would enjoy having them as a chipset customer, but competitively, we feel our chipsets have scale and multiple generations behind them, which theirs do not have. We welcome Nokia in the market because having them there keeps us pushing to stay in the lead, but ultimately Nokia is building chipset product for Nokia. We are building it for everyone.