Qualcomm Inc (QCOM)

[Mindy]

People to watch: Dave Shepard (WHO IS THIS?)

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/business/20041224-9999-1b24person.html


UNION-TRIBUNE
December 24, 2004

Title: Chief executive officer


Age: 43

Company: Sequoia Communications

Employees: 31 in Rancho Bernardo.

Founding Date: September 2000

Dave Shepard joined Sequoia Communications last year after spending 17 years at Texas Instruments.

Sequoia Communications designs RF integrated circuits for wireless phones?



We have frankly a revolutionary approach to designing the chips, with a new architecture that will enable all possible modes, both data and voice, wireless LAN, all the different voice standards that are out there. Everything can be integrated into one chip with one architecture.

Why is that revolutionary?

There is no architecture out there that allows that. So if you wanted to add a mode or add a feature to a phone today, you have to add another chip, or add another set of circuitry to an existing chip, which is very inefficient in terms of both power and cost.

If you looked at a phone five years ago, they were these big bricks. That's where the phone would go without our technology with all the features that are being added today.

What features are you talking about?

The features are a combination of different voice modes. The European standard is GSM. The Asian standard is CDMA, with some using both. The U.S. uses both. You look at Cingular with GSM and you look at Verizon with CDMA. The point is if you want to have a handset that talks all over the world, you have to have a handset that supports those multiple modes in a single handset.

Then you add to all the emerging data standards that third generation is giving us, such as wireless LAN, GPS for positioning, even faster data – all that adds even more modes to the phone. Then there are things coming down the pike. Maybe there will be TV going to the phone, or streaming video. The ability of that handset to integrate all of those modes is what we address.

What stage of development is Sequoia in?

Our first product will come out probably in the second quarter of next year. So we're still in research and development. Most all the people we have here are engineers.

What were your marching orders when you came to the company?

The basic marching order was get the first product completed and get a design win. It's really that simple. We plan to have a design win by the end of next year. A design win means you can call up a phone maker like a Nokia, Motorola or Samsung and they will tell you that the Sequoia chip is in XYZ model and it's going to ramp to production on X date.

What happens next?

What's unique about Sequoia is it's actually a technology platform that can spawn an entire road map of products. That is one of the basic value propositions of the company. We can shorten the design cycle for multimode products significantly. If you have a time frame from concept to production of 2½ years, that means the marketing guys at Nokia or Samsung or Motorola have to figure out what modes are going to be on a phone 2½ years out, which is very difficult. So what we can do is shorten that design cycle so they can put out new phones faster without having to look that far ahead.

What keeps you up at night?

Just the complexity of what we're undertaking here. The industry has not built a chip like this. So it's a big project. It's complex. I'm confident we can do it. But until you actually build it, you think about it every night and try to figure out what you don't know.