Qualcomm Founder, Wife Endow USC Chair

Andrew J. Viterbi, a founder of the wireless firm Qualcomm Inc., and his wife, Erna, have donated $2 million to create a professorial chair at USC’s School of Engineering.

USC Professor Solomon W. Golomb, an expert in digital and space communications, was named the first recipient of the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Chair in Communications.

Viterbi, who earned a PhD from USC in 1962, was a member of Solomon’s research group when the two were at the Pasadena-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the 1950s.

Both men have won praise for their work in communications theory--Viterbi for an algorithm used widely in wireless digital communications, and Golomb for pioneering research in shift register sequences, a method with applications in radar, wireless phones and cryptography.