DSP pioneers to receive first Kilby Award

Two leaders in the early development of digital signal processing (DSP) have been honored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE), the world's largest technical professional society.

Ben Gold and Charles M. Rader will receive the first IEEE Jack S. Kilby Medal "for pioneering research in digital signal processing fundamentals, in speech signal processing, and for their landmark signal processing text," according to IEEE.

The award is sponsored by Texas Instruments in honor of the inventor of the integrated circuit. It includes a gold medal, a bronze replica, a certificate and a $10,000 honorarium.

The work by these two pioneers helped lay the foundation for TI's development of the first commercially viable DSP 15 years ago.

Working together in the 1960s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, Mass., Gold and Rader determined that signal processing problems, particularly in speech and radar, could be solved with digital technology. They developed real-time signal-processing computers and techniques and the concepts of digital filtering as it applied to audio problems.

In 1969, Gold and Rader coauthored a landmark text, Digital Processing of Signals. This book was the first to describe the fundamentals of digital signal processing, including theory, algorithms, hardware and software implementations.

Gold is a Fellow of the IEEE and of the Acoustical Society of America and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He holds a bachelor's degree from the City College of New York and a doctorate from the Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, N.Y., both in electrical engineering. Retired from the MIT Lincoln Lab since 1988, Gold teaches a graduate course on audio signal processing by humans and machines at the University of California at Berkeley.

Rader is a Fellow of the IEEE and a past-president of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He holds a master's degree in electrical engineering from the Polytechnic Institute.