IEEE Awards Booklet - 2018 - 10

2018 ieee medals

IEEE Edison Medal

IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal

Sponsored by Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.

Sponsored by Nokia Bell Labs

Eli Yablonovitch

Nambi Seshadri

For leadership, innovations, and entrepreneurial achievements in photonics,
semiconductor lasers, antennas, and
solar-cells

For contributions to the theory and
practice of wireless communications

The technologies developed by Eli Yablonovitch aﬀect anyone
who uses a mobile phone or searches the Internet.Yablonovitch
proposed that semiconductor lasers should be strained, in order to benefit from reduced valence band (hole) eﬀective mass.
Today, with almost every human interaction with the Internet,
optical telecommunication occurs by strained semiconductor lasers. Most likely, billions of people are unknowingly using his
idea every time they connect to the Internet, make a phone call,
or check e-mail. In his photovoltaic research, Yablonovitch's 4n2
light-trapping factor is in worldwide use for almost all commercial solar panels. Known as the Yablonovitch Limit, this factor increased the theoretical limits and practical eﬃciency of solar cells.
To the extent that solar electricity is blended with other power
sources, there are billions of people unknowingly taking advantage of the Yablonovitch Limit. In his photonics work, Yablonovitch unified Maxwell's Equations and Schrodinger's Equation
through the concept of the photonic crystal. The geometrical
structure of the first experimentally realized photonic bandgap
is often called Yablonovite. His invention of photonic crystals
unifies optics, solid-state physics, electromagnetics, and quantum
optics. Among other applications, photonic crystals are used in
telecommunications, particularly in polarization-splitting twodimensional grating couplers-which are a critical part of silicon photonic integrated circuits. His original paper on photonic
crystals has been cited over 10,000 times and is the second-mostcited paper in the history of Physical Review Letters.Yablonovitch
has cofounded four science-based companies, including Ethertronics, which became a major independent cellphone antenna
manufacturer, having shipped over 2 billion antennas.
An IEEE Fellow and member of both the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences,Yablonovitch holds the James and Katherine Lau Chair in Engineering
and is a professor with the Electrical Engineering and Computer
Sciences Department at the University of California, Berkeley,
Berkeley, CA, USA.

Nambi Seshadri's pioneering research and commercial intuitiveness
have impacted multiple generations of mobile and wireless communications and have helped make technology more aﬀordable
for consumers. While at AT&T Shannon Labs, one of Seshadri's
key research initiatives was his work on transmission and coding
techniques using multiple transmit antennas. This helped create a
new field of wireless communications called space-time coding that
improved the reliability of data transmission. An earlier version of
this work that he did at AT&T Bell Labs, called delay diversity, was
an important component of the 2G cellular time-division multiple
access systems and has also impacted WiFi and LTE systems. His
contributions to reliable transmission of compressed speech over
mobile radio channels also influenced the development of 2G cellular systems. He also drove the adoption of adaptive modulation
and hybrid automatic repeat request techniques (important for high
performance in time varying channels) in to the Enhanced Data
Rates for Global Evolution (EDGE) standards. These techniques
have become core to robust transmission in 3G and 4G systems
around the world. His work on list Viterbi decoding and applications for combined speech and channel decoding as well as data
transmission systems have been applied to improve speech quality
in 2G and 3G systems. Following his career at AT&T Bell Labs and
AT&T Shannon Labs, Seshadri helped build Broadcom into a significant player in the wireless market. Here, he initiated or nurtured
projects such as short-range wireless, WiFi modems in phones, cellular modems, GPS, near-field communications, and the multimedia
chip set strategy that resulted in pioneering products such as the
high-definition video camcorder and advanced megapixel camera
phones. Through his leadership, the company was able to reduce
prices while improving the performance of wireless chipsets. This
system-on-chip integration of applications processing, graphics,
haptics,WiFi, Bluetooth, camera, and 2G/3G/4G modems has impacted the industry by making smart phones much more aﬀordable.
An IEEE Fellow and member of the U.S. National Academy
of Engineering, Seshadri is a professor of electrical and computer
engineering at the University of California, San Diego, San Diego,
CA, and consulting CTO at Quantenna Communications, San Jose,
CA, USA, in addition to serving as an advisor for several startups.

Scope: For a career of meritorious achievement in electrical
science, electrical engineering, or the electrical arts.

Scope: For exceptional contributions to communications and
networking sciences and engineering.

10 | 2018 IEEE awards bookLET

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