Telecom & wireless startups in San Diego

Kishore Seendripu, Curtis Ling, Madhukar Reddy (all ex-Silicon Wave/Broadcom RF)

Founded 2003 in Carlsbad; NASDAQ: MXL. RF, high-performance analog and mixed-signal semiconductors for broadband, connectivity, wireless-infrastructure and data-center interconnect. Founding team traces to S...

Ronald Reedy, Mark Burgener

Founded 1988 in San Diego; pioneer of UltraCMOS RF-SOI technology for high-performance RF integrated circuits (switches, tuners, front-end modules) in mobile, aerospace/defense and infrastructure. Shipped 4B...

Irwin Jacobs, Andrew Viterbi, Franklin Antonio, Klein Gilhousen, Harvey White, Adelia Coffman, Andrew Cohen (7 co-founders)

Founded July 1985 in Irwin Jacobs' living room by seven Linkabit veterans. Invented and commercialized CDMA, the foundation of 3G/4G/5G cellular; today a ~$150B+ chip and licensing giant (Snapdragon SoCs, RF...

Albert Liu (ex-Qualcomm/Samsung/Wireless researcher)

Founded 2015, San Diego–HQ edge-AI semiconductor company. Designs reconfigurable NPUs that run LLMs and neural nets on-device instead of the cloud; chips fabbed at TSMC and used in Foxconn EVs and Hanwha cam...

Robert Donahue / Nitin Jain (founders)

Founded 1999; supplier of silicon mmWave beamforming ICs for active phased-array antennas in 5G, SATCOM and defense/radar. Acquired by Qorvo in early 2024. HQ-flag: dual-hub — sources list both San Diego and...

Costas Soler & Graeme Rae

Founded 2021 in Encinitas; builds instrumented 'smart buoy' platforms that capture real-time ocean data (pH, salinity, underwater noise, atmospheric carbon). Contracts with the DoD, Port of San Diego, NOAA a...