Durga Malladi

Durga Malladi is Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cellular Modems & Infrastructure in Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

Durga joined Qualcomm in 1998 as a Senior Engineer. Over the past 25 years, he has worked on SatCom, 3G, 4G and 5G technologies in various R&D and Business roles.

He led 4G LTE / LTE-Advanced Research in Qualcomm from 2004-14, working on features such as Carrier Aggregation, Voice over LTE (VoLTE), Small cells, HetNets, Relays, Licensed Assisted Access (LAA), Internet of Things (eMTC, NB-IoT), Broadcast and Cellular V2X.

From 2014-18, he led 5G Research in Qualcomm, focusing on enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC), Industrial IoT, Cellular V2X, Integrated Access & Backhaul (IAB) systems, Unlicensed & Shared Spectrum, Massive IoT (mIoT) and Low/High Power Millimeter Wave systems. The responsibilities spanned system design, standardization, prototype testbeds, pre-commercial vendor inter-operability tests and trials.

Since 2018, as Senior VP & General Manager for Cellular Modems and Infrastructure, he drives the overall 5G Modem-RF technology roadmap across all business units, spanning Mobile Handset, Compute, XR, Wearables, Infrastructure, Wireless Fiber, IoT and Automotive segments. In addition, he is responsible for Wireless Fiber, Infrastructure and Satellite Communication businesses.

He is the recipient of Qualcomm’s IP Excellence Award, Qualcomm Distinguished Contributor Award for Project Leadership and Upendra Patel Achievement Awards for Outstanding Contributions. He won the 2023 Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

Durga holds a B.Tech. (’93) from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and an M.S (’95) and Ph.D. (’98) from UCLA. His Ph.D. dissertation is on Adaptive Estimation techniques, and his research interests include Signal Processing, Communication Theory, Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and holds 564 U.S. patents in Wireless Communications.