Qualcomm co-founder Franklin Antonio is giving UC San Diego $30 million to expand the university’s huge engineering school, which provides the company with a lot of the talent it needs to compete in the global chipmaking industry.

The donation will help underwrite a $180 million research complex at the Jacobs School of Engineering, whose nearly 9,000 students make it among the largest engineering programs on the West Coast.

The school is named after fellow Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs, who gave the program $110 million in 2003, enabling the campus to become a leader in everything from chip design to robotics.

Antonio’s $30 million gift is the second largest donation ever made by one of the university’s alumni. It comes nine months after alumnus Taner Halicioglu, who helped to create Facebook, gave the school $75 million for a data science institute.


The two gifts are part of UC San Diego’s 10-year effort to raise a record $2 billion in private donations. The school is roughly half way through the campaign, and has raised about $1 billion.

“I have been setting aside money every year for years and have been looking for good opportunities,” said the 65 year-old Antonio, who is semi-retired but remains chief scientist of San Diego-based Qualcomm.

“I was thinking of doing something smaller, maybe support a little research here and there. But then Al showed me the opportunities with the new building, and I jumped on it.”

Antonio was referring to Albert Pisano, dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering. Pisano is pushing to construct a 200,000 square-foot research and education building that would be partly divided into 11 so-called “collaboratories.” The campus wants to place groups of scientists and engineers from different disciplines in the same area to encourage collaboration.


The campus just received $3 million from Sanjay Jha, a former Qualcomm executive, and his wife Fiona Mackin-Jha, to support one of the collaboratories.

Pisano said the Antonio and Jha gifts are “gi-normous. They give us huge momentum for raising money for the building.

“We already send lots of workers to companies like Qualcomm, Illumina and ViaSat. The building — and its collaboratories — will help us do more, especially research that will help companies well into the next decade. We’ll be focusing on things like energy, health care, intelligent networks, data security, and better ways to communicate.

“This is going to help us drive the digital economy of San Diego and of Southern California.”


The school pays particular attention to computer chips and telecommunications, largely because of the influence of Irwin Jacobs, who served on the university’s faculty from 1966 to 1972.

Jacobs also co-founded Linkabit, an influential telecom company that recruited Antonio during the firm’s early days. In 1985, Antonio joined Jacobs and Andrew Viterbi in co-founding Qualcomm, which now has almost 34,000 employees, roughly 13,000 of whom work in San Diego.

The company is currently battling a $103 billion takeover attempt from Irvine-based Broadcom.

If the takeover succeeds, it could reduce the donations and research grants UC San Diego has been getting from Qualcomm.


“We love that Qualcomm came out of UC San Diego and is a San Diego-based company,” said Pradeep Khosla, the university’s chancellor. “A transition to a new company might bury that in history somewhere. But (Broadcom) has to do what is right for its shareholders.

“We expect to continue building our relationship with Qualcomm, and with other companies.

“(Antonio’s) donation is very significant,” he said. “It comes from an alumnus, which creates a lot of good feeling about our capital campaign. And it will lead to a new building in engineering, which connects multiple disciplines. It’s like a glue that holds things together.

“This is a moment of pride for us.”


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