James R. “Jim” Boddie, a pioneer of the programmable, single-chip digital signal processor, died on 2 December at his residence in Canton, Ga., following a protracted sickness. The IEEE senior member was 74.
Whereas working as an architect and designer at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J., Boddie utilized his experience in signal processing algorithms to develop a brand new kind 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 turned one of many trade’s first profitable DSPs.
Jim led the event of 5 subsequent DSP generations, economically enabling quite a few functions, many for the primary time, from AT&T’s gigantic phone switching methods to tiny digital hearing aids.
For his contributions as a staff 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, acquired the IEEE Liebmann Award.
The primary digital sign processor
Jim was born in Tallassee, a small metropolis in Alabama. He acquired 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 acquired his doctorate and commenced 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 get rid of echoes in conference-room speakerphones.
Throughout his fellowship, he met IEEE Life Fellow Dan Stanzione, a Bell Labs group supervisor who recruited him to affix the corporate’s first DSP design staff in 1977. Stanzione, who turned the eighth president of Bell Labs, stated in a 2015 interview with the Computer History Museum’s oral history project that his first assembly with Jim was “a fortunate day for me.” Jim arrived throughout the glory days of Bell Labs, when algorithm consultants, semiconductor consultants, and system designers labored for one firm, as a rule down the corridor from each other.
Previous to 1980, most sign processing functions had been applied with analog elements. Superior algorithms akin to low-data-rate speech coding and speech recognition had been validated within the digital area utilizing supercomputer simulations and had been too complicated to be applied with analog designs. Against this, digital designs used racks of elements nicely past industrial feasibility. The dream of a reasonable, high-performance digital sign processor appeared far off, as no single DSP structure would work for all algorithms. Subsequently Texas Instruments and related firms offered common digital constructing blocks akin to multipliers and register information.
Stanzione’s aim was to create a broadly relevant DSP that would exchange his division’s {custom} analog filter designs. In time, the staff homed in on a selected filtering software: DTMF (dual-tone multifrequency) signaling, which decoded a cellphone’s dial tones into the dialed quantity to route calls. It could be deployed by new digital methods in ample quantity to justify the price of creating the DSP.
The staff breadboarded the filters and located that with a intelligent structure, and a 4.5-micron full-custom negative-channel metal-oxide semiconductor—one of the best course of know-how on the time—they may meet the efficiency requirement. Different associated functions could be icing on the cake.
Jim made important 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 out there outdoors AT&T. It achieved high-volume manufacturing in AT&T methods, although.
Jim was promoted to supervisor of the DSP structure staff in 1980 to set the course for subsequent variations.
A frontrunner and entrepreneur
DSP1 was quickly adopted by DSP2, with quicker efficiency and a higher reminiscence capability to fulfill high-volume demand and to extend the vary of functions the place the know-how may very well be used.
In parallel with the event of DSP2, Jim led a brand new structure, DSP32, which used floating-point arithmetic. For digital signal processing, floating-point arithmetic simplifies the job of sustaining precision, a near-impossible burden in probably the most demanding algorithms.
Jim and his staff introduced the DSP32 in a 1985 ISSCC doc, which acquired a Greatest Paper Award.
Afterward, his staff returned to the drafting board and developed the DSP16, which used fixed-point arithmetic. Introduced on the 1987 ISSCC, DSP16 turned 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 acquired 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 with the intention to exploit parallelism in DSP code.
In 2002, after StarCore’s first designs had been launched, Will Strauss, president of market analysis agency Ahead Ideas, stated, “The mixture of the brand new firm’s enterprise mannequin and world-class know-how choices characterize a dramatic change within the industry landscape.”
Life after the DSP
Jim was an early adopter of residence computer systems, buying practically each mannequin that Apple offered. Together 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 in addition of personal plane.
He was a devoted ham radio operator—name signal NG2J—and took part in contests. Discipline Day was his favourite. The annual weekend occasion in June challenges ham radio fanatics worldwide to function in distant areas to simulate emergency situations and trade simulated emergency messages.
After retiring, Jim programmed a 3D virtual tour of the Alamo, a historic web site in San Antonio. This system lets customers view the previous Spanish mission from any course in each the current and the previous. The tour, which launched in 2022, is out there on the Alamo and on-line.
At the moment digital sign processing is pervasive. Help for its algorithms and functions 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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