IEEE Awards Booklet - 2009 - 20

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T E C H N I C A L

F I E L D

AWA R D S

2009 IEEE
Reynold B. Johnson Data Storage
Device Technology Award

2009 IEEE
Reynold B. Johnson Information
Storage Systems Award

Sponsored by Hitachi Global
Storage Technologies

Sponsored by IBM Almaden
Research Center

Kinam Kim

Marshall Kirk McKusick

For leadership in and contribution to semiconductor
memory technology which enabled the growth of low
cost consumer data storage devices

For fundamental contributions in file system design,
mentoring file system designers and disseminating file
system research

Executive vice president and general manager of Semiconductor
R&D center at Samsung Electronics, Kinam Kim's contributions to
semiconductor memory technology have helped change the world
of consumer electronics. Under his leadership, Samsung Electronics
introduced the first 1-Gb and 4-Gb dynamic random access memory
(DRAM) and advanced the capabilities of NAND flash memory,
fueling the progress of MP3 players, USB memory sticks and memory
cards for digital cameras. He developed the recess cell array transistor for DRAM to handle leakage currents that cause reduced data
retention times and the MESH capacitor to allow increased stack
height without limiting cell capacitance. Dr. Kim and his team demonstrated increased NAD flash density every year from 2Gb in 2002
to 32Gb in 2006, and Samsung achieved significant market growth
with low-cost NAND manufacturing. Additionally, he demonstrated
a floating gate shielding process to reduce cell cross talk and threedimensional stacking of memory layers. An IEEE Fellow, Dr. Kim is
also a Fellow at Samsung.

Marshall Kirk McKusick is best known for the design, architecture and
implementation of the 4.2 Berkeley Software Distribution (4.2BSD)
Fast File System (FFS), which is still in wide use today in most variants
of the UNIX operating system. Dr. McKusick introduced rotational
optimization, multiple block sizes with fragments, cylinder clustering
and optimized block location to improve performance, and his system
enhanced reliability by replicating critical data structures and placing
them strategically on the disk to make them resilient to failures. The
FFS architecture emphasized all these attributes which enabled
computers to handle parallel tasks and simultaneous users. Dr.
McKusick's long-standing influence can be seen in his willingness to
share and disseminate his research. He has made available production quality code through FreeBSD-a free operating system
compatible with UNIX-and he has mentored and provided assistance to the next generation of file system developers and creators
of other systems, such as Linux. An IEEE Member, Dr. McKusick is an
independent consultant residing in Berkeley, California.

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AWA R D

2009 IEEE
Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award
Sponsored by IEEE Life
Members Committee

Daniel J. Costello, Jr. and G. David Forney, Jr.
An IEEE Life Fellow, Dr. Costello has previously received the
Humboldt Research Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt
Foundation, Germany. Dr. Costello's research interests are in the
area of digital communications, with special emphasis on error
control coding and coded modulation. He has numerous technical
publications and co-authored a popular textbook in the field. He is
currently the Leonard Bettex Professor of Electrical Engineering at
the University of Notre Dame, Indiana.

"Channel Coding: The Road to Channel Capacity,"
Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 95, June 2007, pp. 1150-1177
DOI: 10.1109/JPROC.2007.895188
Daniel J. Costello, Jr. and G. David Forney, Jr.'s "Channel Coding:
The Road to Channel Capacity" traces the history of the field of
channel coding and of progress towards reaching channel capacity.
Channel capacity (or the "Shannon limit") measures how fast information can be reliably transmitted over a communications channel.
The paper by Costello and Forney details the efforts during the
past 60 years to design codes and decoding schemes that could
approach the Shannon limit, discussing the successes and failures
of both algebraic coding techniques, which were the dominant
techniques for several decades, and probabilistic coding techniques, which recently solved the problem of approaching the
Shannon limit in practical systems. Both authors have been pioneers
in the development of channel coding theory since the 1960s.

An IEEE Life Fellow, Dr. Forney has received several awards including
the IEEE Information Theory Society Claude E. Shannon Award and
the IEEE Edison Medal. Dr. Forney's career has spanned both the
theory and the practical application of coding and information
theory. He is currently an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and is a member of the U. S.
National Academy of Engineering and U.S. National Academy of
Sciences.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Awards Booklet - 2009