Intellectual Property Law

The tech talent and funding drain to China and India is one of the "scariest things going on in the United States," right now said Paul Jacobs, wireless chipmaker Qualcomm's CEO in a tech policy conference currently underway in Los Angeles.

"We train the students, they go back, and we send venture capital funding out to follow them," he said at the Tech Policy Summit , an annual gathering of the top movers and shakers in Silicon Valley and the world of tech policy on Wednesday.   

Jacobs estimates that 60 percent of the university graduates that Qualcomm hires are born abroad. The company doesn't seek out foreign-born nationals -- that 60 percent ratio seems to reflect the actual composition of the talent pool available, he said during a  q&a with Steve Wildstrom, a BusinessWeek technology columnist.

"It's really a hard situation, right now," says Jacobs, who adds that he expects only to receive half of the specialized H-1B work visas to come through for his hires. He recently sent a letter to Homeland Security, he says, to request that it extend practical work training visas to 29 months.

Qualcomm is on a hiring binge, he says -- at the beginning of the fiscal year the company hired a thousand people. It still has a thousand openings.

"We're growing rapidly, and we're really resource-limited," he says.

Jacobs made the comments during a wide-ranging q&a session with Wildstrom. Subjects of conversation included patent reform, the future of open wireless platforms and the development of intelligent, agile radios (Jacobs thinks their evolution -- through software at least -- is stalled.)

Photo: Paul Jacobs, courtesy Qualcomm