Thursday, June 5, 2008 – 8:00-9:00 AM
“Lessons Unlearned in Wireless”
Dr. Rajiv Laroia, Senior VP of Technology, Qualcomm, Inc.

The talk deals with our experiences while designing the flash-OFDM system and will focus on things we had to learn or things we believed to be true when we started designing the wireless data system but had to unlearn during the process.

Dr. Rajiv Laroia is Senior Vice President of Technology at Qualcomm. He was the founder and CTO of Flarion Technologies. Flarion was acquired by Qualcomm in January 2006. He is an expert in OFDMA, CDMA, TDMA and other cellular multiple access technologies and is intimately familiar with the current and next generation of wireless standards including LTE, UMB, WiMAX, IS-95, UMTS, CDMA 2000, IS-136, GSM, and EDGE.

Dr. Laroia has a very broad background that spans wireless communication, data transmission, information theory, VLSI design and architecture, analog mixed-signal and RF circuit design, high-speed AD/DA data converters, speech image and video compression.

Prior to launching Flarion, Dr. Laroia was with Lucent Technologies Bell Laboratories since 1992 when he joined the prestigious Mathematical Sciences Research Center. In 1997, he became the head of Bell Labs' Digital Communications Research Department in the Wireless Research Center, where he and his team initially started to develop flash-OFDM technology based wireless data system.

He received his Ph.D. and master's degrees from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1992 and 1989 and a bachelor's degree in 1985 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, all in electrical engineering. His thesis also contributed to V.34, the ITU voice-band modem international standard. He has over 50 issued patents and more than 150 pending. He has won numerous industry awards. He was indicted into the Innovations Hall of Fame, University of Maryland, College Park, in 2006. In 2007, he won the IIT Delhi Distinguished Alumni Award. Dr. Laroia is a Fellow of the IEEE.