United Mobile Apps

Rick Compton

Rick is a pioneer in the field of 3G and 4G wireless technologies. He received his PhD from Caltech as a Fulbright Scholar. Early in his career he was a tenured professor in the faculty Electrical Engineering at Cornell University. While at Cornell he was the recipient of a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator during the President George H. W Bush administration. His primary area of research was advanced wireless materials, devices and circuits. At the invitation of the FCC commissioner, Rick served as a committee member for the Commission and directed to formulate rules for allocating spectrum for new wireless services. Following his service for the FCC, Rick worked at Hewlett-Packard and then Lucent Technologies as the Director responsible for multi-megagbit radios used in high-speed internet access for residential and business applications.

Rick left Lucent to become the founding CTO of the cellular carrier Monet Mobile Networks. Monet’s spectrum footprint covered 20million residents in the midwest when they launched the first 3G commercial service in the United States. Rick managed basestation evaluation, handset selection and services strategy. Monet was funded by Bill Gates, Qualcomm and Intel. In early 2000 Rick becamthe founding Chairman and CEO of Cequint, a startup devoted to mobile phone applications. Cequint was later acquired by TNS for $112M.

Rick joined Beceem Communications in 2004 as the Vice President for System Engineering. At Beceem he helped develop the first commercial 4G chipset. Beceem grew to become the leading WiMAX chip supplier worldwide. While at Beceem, Rick worked with Samsung on the world’s first 4G handset. Beceem was acquired by Broadcom in 2010.

Rick is now Vice President of System Product Engineering at Nvidia where he is responsible for System Level testing of GPU, Mobile and Automotive Products.

Rick has published over 100 publications and holds six patents.