2011 IEEE Honors: IEEE/RSE Wolfson James Clerk Maxwell Award - Marcian E. Hoff

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As one of the inventors of the first microprocessor, Marcian E. Hoff revolutionized the computing and electronics industries, and other contributions have helped usher in the digital age of communications. Dr. Hoff is best known for his role in develop- ing the first microprocessor (the Intel 4004) with Stanley Mazor and Federico Faggin in 1969. Dr. Hoff also applied the micropro- cessor concept to programmable digital devices that revolutionized telephony, opened the door to mobile communi- cations and enabled digital delivery of music and photos as well. From 1975 to 1980, Dr. Hoff led a team at Intel that moved signal processing from the analog domain to the digital domain. Working with Matt Townsend, Stephen Dryer and John Huggins, the first commercially available monolithic CODEC (the Intel 2910) was released in 1978 for converting voice signals between analog and digital formats. Today, this process is taken for granted, but this work helped launch the digital age of commu- nications. In 1979, Dr. Hoff's team released the Intel 2920, which was an early digital signal processing chip. Dr. Hoff's impact began well before inventing the first microprocessor. As a doctoral student at Stanford University in 1960, he developed the least mean squares (LMS) adaptive algorithm with thesis advisor Bernard Widrow. The LMS algorithm became one of the enabling technologies of the Internet, and it is now used in some form in most modems and adaptive signal processors for echo cancellation, channel equalization and adaptive antennas. An IEEE Life Fellow, Dr. Hoff retired from Teklicon, Inc., San Jose, Calif., in 1997, where he served as chief technologist

Marcian E. Hoff receives the IEEE/RSE Wolfson James Clerk Maxwell Award for developments in programmable integrated circuitry for a wide range of applications

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