James R. “Jim” Boddie, a pioneer of the programmable, single-chip digital sign processor, died on 2 December at his residence in Canton, Ga., following a protracted sickness. The IEEE senior member was 74.
While working as an architect and designer at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J., Boddie utilized his experience in sign processing algorithms to develop a brand new sort of semiconductor: the DSP. The built-in circuit, which Bell Labs known as DSP1, was introduced on the 1980 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). DSP1 grew to become one of many business’s first profitable DSPs.
Jim led the event of 5 subsequent DSP generations, economically enabling quite a few purposes, many for the primary time, from AT&T’s gigantic phone switching methods to tiny digital listening to aids.
For his contributions as a workforce chief in addition to his technical improvements, Jim was elevated to Bell Labs Fellow. In 1988 he and IEEE Senior Member Richard A. Pedersen, a codeveloper of the DSP, obtained the IEEE Liebmann Award.
The first digital sign processor
Jim was born in Tallassee, a small metropolis in Alabama. He obtained a bachelor’s diploma in electrical engineering in 1971 from Auburn University, in Alabama. After incomes a grasp’s diploma in EE two years later from MIT, he returned to Auburn to pursue a Ph.D. In 1976 he obtained his doctorate and started a yearlong postdoctoral fellowship at Bell Labs’ acoustic analysis division in Holmdel.
There he programmed a refrigerator-size DSP system to do real-time de-reverberation of speech and eradicate echoes in conference-room speakerphones.
During his fellowship, he met IEEE Life Fellow Dan Stanzione, a Bell Labs group supervisor who recruited him to hitch the corporate’s first DSP design workforce in 1977. Stanzione, who grew to become the eighth president of Bell Labs, stated in a 2015 interview with the Computer History Museum’s oral historical past undertaking that his first assembly with Jim was “a lucky day for me.” Jim arrived throughout the glory days of Bell Labs, when algorithm specialists, semiconductor specialists, and system designers labored for one firm, as a rule down the corridor from each other.
Prior to 1980, most sign processing purposes have been carried out with analog parts. Advanced algorithms reminiscent of low-data-rate speech coding and speech recognition have been validated within the digital area utilizing supercomputer simulations and have been too complicated to be carried out with analog designs. By distinction, digital designs used racks of parts nicely past industrial feasibility. The dream of an affordable, high-performance digital sign processor appeared far off, as no single DSP structure would work for all algorithms. Therefore Texas Instruments and comparable corporations bought common digital constructing blocks reminiscent of multipliers and register information.
Stanzione’s objective was to create a extensively relevant DSP that would exchange his division’s {custom} analog filter designs. In time, the workforce homed in on a particular filtering software: DTMF (dual-tone multifrequency) signaling, which decoded a telephone’s dial tones into the dialed quantity to route calls. It can be deployed by new digital methods in adequate quantity to justify the price of growing the DSP.
The workforce breadboarded the filters and located that with a intelligent structure, and a 4.5-micron full-custom negative-channel metal-oxide semiconductor—the most effective course of know-how on the time—they might meet the efficiency requirement. Other associated purposes can be icing on the cake.
Jim made crucial contributions to DSP1. Foremost amongst them was the design of its novel arithmetic unit.
After DSP1 was introduced on the 1980 ISSCC, it was not commercially accessible outdoors AT&T. It achieved high-volume manufacturing in AT&T methods, although.
Jim was promoted to supervisor of the DSP structure workforce in 1980 to set the route for subsequent variations.
A pacesetter and entrepreneur
DSP1 was quickly adopted by DSP2, with sooner efficiency and a better reminiscence capability to satisfy high-volume demand and to extend the vary of purposes the place the know-how might be used.
In parallel with the event of DSP2, Jim led a brand new structure, DSP32, which used floating-point arithmetic. For digital sign processing, floating-point arithmetic simplifies the job of sustaining precision, a near-impossible burden in probably the most demanding algorithms.
Jim and his workforce introduced the DSP32 in a 1985 ISSCC doc, which obtained a Best Paper Award.
Afterward, his workforce returned to the drafting board and developed the DSP16, which used fixed-point arithmetic. Announced on the 1987 ISSCC, DSP16 grew to become the world’s quickest DSP, a title it retained for a number of years.
In 1998 Jim left AT&T and helped discovered StarCore, a DSP design middle in Atlanta. It was funded by Agere Systems, which had acquired Bell Labs Microelectronics; Motorola; and, later, Infineon. The startup’s sponsors obtained unique rights to include StarCore’s DSP designs into their very own IC merchandise. Jim served as StarCore’s govt director till his retirement in 2006.
StarCore’s architectures used a protracted instruction phrase structure that encoded a number of, unbiased operations in a single instruction to be able to exploit parallelism in DSP code.
In 2002, after StarCore’s first designs had been launched, Will Strauss, president of market analysis agency Forward Concepts, stated, “The combination of the new company’s business model and world-class technology offerings represent a dramatic change in the industry landscape.”
Life after the DSP
Jim was an early adopter of residence computer systems, buying almost each mannequin that Apple bought. Along with a MIDI keyboard, he used the computer systems for music synthesis in addition to flight-simulation video games. He was an avid flier, not solely of simulators but additionally of personal plane.
He was a devoted ham radio operator—name signal NG2J—and took part in contests. Field Day was his favourite. The annual weekend occasion in June challenges ham radio lovers worldwide to function in distant places to simulate emergency situations and trade simulated emergency messages.
After retiring, Jim programmed a 3D digital tour of the Alamo, a historic website in San Antonio. The program lets customers view the previous Spanish mission from any route in each the current and the previous. The tour, which launched in 2022, is obtainable on the Alamo and on-line.
Today digital sign processing is pervasive. Support for its algorithms and purposes are a basic requirement for nearly all programmable semiconductors. Jim’s contributions to DSP know-how shall be remembered. Equally so, we and tons of of others will bear in mind Jim for his variety mentorship and clear imaginative and prescient.
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