Andrew Viterbi

Biography

Dr. Viterbi is a pioneer in the field of Wireless Communications. He received his Bachelors and Masters degrees from MIT, and his Ph.D. in digital communications from the University of Southern California (USC). He taught at UCLA and consulted for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) immediately after obtaining his Ph.D. He was a co-founder of Linkabit in 1968, a small military contractor, and co-founded QualComm with Irwin Jacobs in 1985. He created the Viterbi Algorithm for interference suppression and efficient decoding of a digital transmission sequence, used by all four international standards for digital cellular telephony. QualComm is the recognized pioneer of the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) digital wireless technology, which allows many users to share the same radio frequencies, and thereby increase system capacity many times over analog system capacity. Awarded the 1990 Marconi Prize for his achievements in the field of digital communications in many adverse environments, particularly through his widely-used algorithm, Viterbi is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, and was inducted as a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1978 and of the National Academy of Sciences in 1996. He received the 2007 National Medal of Science from the President of the United States and the 2010 IEEE Medal of Honor, the Institute’s highest honor.

Source: The Marconi Society