A couple of major M&A deals that involve some of San Diego’s biggest tech companies are in the works. We’ve got the details, along with the rest of our Monday morning roundup.

—San Diego-based Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN), which provides Internet security software that companies use to limit employees’ access to business-related websites, has retained Frank Quattrone’s Qatalyst Partners to explore the idea of putting itself up for sale. The trial balloon was floated last week in The Wall Street Journal, which said the San Diego Web-filtering company could be worth about $1 billion in a sale.

—Kishore Seendripu, the chairman and founding CEO of Carlsbad, CA-based MaxLinear, told investors and analysts at the Roth Capital Partners small cap growth conference that he expects annual sales will continue to grow between 30 percent and 50 percent over the next three years. MaxLinear is a fabless wireless chip design company that went public just over a year ago.

—The two-day Health 2.0 Spring Fling conference that begins today in San Diego will focus on three themes: making health care cheaper; the evolution of healthcare research; and prevention, wellness, exercise, and food. Officials from the West Wireless Health Institute in San Diego are set to make presentations on new models for care delivery, new technologies that cut costs, and alternate funding models tailored for a faster and lower cost approach to health technology innovation.

—San Diego’s Maxwell Technologies (NASDAQ: MXWL) is finally beginning to show growth in its sales of ultracapacitors, after spending more than a decade trying to develop the global market for the rechargeable energy storage devices. Maxwell CEO David Schramm attributed Maxwell’s increasing ultracapacitor sales to wind turbines and automobiles in a presentation to analysts and investors last week at the Roth Capital Partners conference.

—Qualcomm co-founder Andrew Viterbi has joined the strategic advisory board at San Diego-based On-Ramp Wireless. The startup has been developing wireless network technology to connect very large networks, such as electric utility “smart grids.”

—San Diego’s Fallbrook Technologies signed a joint venture agreement with China’s Ningbo Shentong Group to develop and market Fallbrook’s continuously variable planetary (CVP) transmissions for electric-powered passenger cars and light trucks. Fallbrook says the China-based joint venture will initially focus on developing the market for Fallbrook’s NuVinci CVP transmissions and electric vehicle drive train systems in China.

—Shareholders of San Jose, CA-based Atheros Communications voted Friday to approve San Diego-based Qualcomm’s $3.1 billion buyout offer. The deal, which ranks as Qualcomm’s biggest acquisition, is expected to be completed during the first half of this year.

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Qualcomm co-founder Andrew Viterbi has joined the strategic advisory board at San Diego’s On-Ramp Wireless, which has been developing wireless networking technology capable of connecting billions of hard-to-reach devices throughout a metropolitan or broad multi-county region. Viterbi is president of the Viterbi Group, a technical advisory and investment company, and serves as a visiting professor at the University of Southern California and at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

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Wireless pioneer and UC San Diego professor emeritus Andrew Viterbi received a National Medal of Science from President Bush in a White House ceremony Monday, in part for work that later became known as “the Viterbi algorithm.”

That might sound like a sequel to “The Bourne Ultimatum,” but the algorithm is actually used in virtually every cell phone today. Also known as the “maximum-likelihood algorithm for convolutional coding,” it is used to suppress radio interference and efficiently decode digital transmission sequences.

Viterbi also made important contributions to CDMA, the wireless technology shorthand for Code Division Multiple Access, which served as the foundation for San Diego-based Qualcomm and transformed the theory and practice of digital communications.

Viterbi is one of the founders of Linkabit, one of San Diego’s early startups and a co-founder of Qualcomm. One of Viterbi’s co-founders in both companies was Irwin Jacobs, who took home a National Medal of Science of his own in 1994.

Viterbi received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from MIT, and his Ph.D. in digital communications from the University of Southern California. In 2004, Andrew and Erna Viterbi committed $52 million to USC’s engineering school, which was renamed in their honor. He is currently a professor emeritus at UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering and heads the Viterbi Group, a San Diego technical advisory and investment business.

President Bush told the recipients who gathered in the White House East Room that the setting was  appropriate for a ceremony honoring innovators for extending the frontiers of knowledge, because ”Thomas Jefferson reportedly used this room as a place to lay out his fossils.” A White House transcript of the event is here.

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