Bob Adams (electrical engineer)
Robert Whitlock Adams is a Technical Fellow at Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI) in Wilmington, Massachusetts.[1][2] His focus is on signal processing and analog-to-digital conversion for professional audio.[3] He is a leader in the development of sigma-delta converters, introducing architectural advances including mismatch shaping, multi-bit quantization, and continuous-time architectures.[4]
Adams graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Tufts University in 1976.[4] From 1977 to 1988 he worked for DBX, a professional audio recording company. There, he helped develop the industry's first audio converter with greater than 16-bit resolution, as well as one of the earliest digital audio recorders.[3] In 1988, he joined the Converter Group of Analog Devices as a Senior Staff Designer, and went on to develop ADI's first sigma-delta converters in partnership with Paul Ferguson. He produced the world's first monolithic asynchronous sample rate converters (the AD1890 family),[4] and he created ADI's sigmaDSP line of audio-specific digital signal processing cores.[3][4]
As of 1998, Adams had received 15 patents related to audio signal processing.[5]
Awards and honors
- Elected Fellow of the Audio Engineering Society (AES), 1991[6]
- Received AES Silver Medal Award, 1995[6]
- Included in Electronic Design magazine's Engineering Hall of Fame, 2011[7]
- Became a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2012 "for contributions to analog and digital signal processing"[8][9]
- Received the IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award, 2015 "for contributions to noise-shaping data converter circuits, digital signal processing, and log-domain analog filters"[1]
- Elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering in 2018[10] for contributions to digital storage and reproduction of high-fidelity audio.
References
- Olstein, K. (21 July 2014). "IEEE Fellow Robert Adams Wins 2015 Donald O. Pederson Award". Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Archived from the original on 18 October 2014. Retrieved 26 September 2014.
- Titus, Jon (18 March 2009). "Audio ADCs Hit the High Notes". ECN Magazine. Advantage Business Media. Retrieved 26 September 2014.
- Tuite, Don (3 December 2011). "Bob Adams: Navigating The Sigma-Delta Roadmap". Electronic Design. Retrieved 26 September 2014.
- Taranovich, Steve (16 July 2012). "Analog: Back to the future, part two". EDN Network. UBM Tech. Retrieved 26 September 2014.
- Adams, Robert; Nguyen, Khiem Q.; Sweetland, Karl (December 1998). "A 113-dB SNR Oversampling DAC with Segmented Noise-Shaped Scrambling" (PDF). IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits. 33 (12): 1878. Bibcode:1998IJSSC..33.1871A. doi:10.1109/4.735526. S2CID 25073383. Retrieved 30 October 2014.
- "AES Awards". Audio Engineering Society. Retrieved 16 October 2014.
- "Engineering Hall of Fame 2011". Electronic Design. Archived from the original on 2014-10-18. Retrieved 26 September 2014.
- "IEEE Fellows Directory". Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Retrieved 26 September 2014.
- "2012 Newly Elevated Fellows" (PDF). Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Retrieved 5 February 2018.
- "Mr. Robert W. Adams". National Academy of Engineering. Retrieved 21 September 2019.