Marconi Society Honors Gordon Moore, Claude BerrouMarconi Society Honors Gordon Moore, Claude Berrou

LONDON — Intel co-founder Gordon Moore is to be awarded the Marconi Society Lifetime Achievement Award, only the third recipient of the accolade in the Society’s 31 year history. And Professor Claude Berrou, co-inventor of turbo codes with Alain Glavieux at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications de Bretagne, France will receive the 2005 Marconi Prize.

The awards ceremony, to be held November 4 in New York, will be preceded by a day-long symposium focusing on the present and future implications of Moore's Law. Marconi Society Chairman Robert Lucky said the award to Berrou recognizes the unconventional approaches to problem-solving he and Glavieux followed to open up “new avenues of research that have led to modern advances in mobile telephony, satellite and radio communications."

Claude Berrou and his late research partner, Alain Glavieux, stunned the assembly at the 1993 IEEE International Conference on Communications in Geneva with their paper introducing turbo codes, solving a data communications puzzle that had evaded researchers for 40 years. The impact of turbo codes has been influential in such breakthroughs as the development of 3G telephones and the transmission of high resolution pictures from deep space.

The other people to have received the Marconi Society's Lifetime Achievement Award were mathematician Claude Shannon, the founder of modern information theory who invented the concept of the bit, and William Baker the director of research and later president of Bell Laboratories. During his tenure, Bell Labs researchers received eleven Nobel prizes in different aspects of semiconductor and communications technologies.