James R. “Jim” Boddie, a pioneer of the programmable, single-chip digital signal processor, died on 2 December at his home in Canton, Ga., following a long illness. The IEEE senior member was 74.
While working as an architect and designer at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J., Boddie applied his expertise in signal processing algorithms to develop a new type of semiconductor: the DSP. The integrated circuit, which Bell Labs called DSP1, was announced at the 1980 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). DSP1 became one of the industry’s first successful DSPs.
Jim led the development of five subsequent DSP generations, economically enabling numerous applications, many for the first time, from AT&T’s gigantic telephone switching systems to tiny digital hearing aids.
For his contributions as a team leader as well as his technical innovations, Jim was elevated to Bell Labs Fellow. In 1988 he and IEEE Senior Member Richard A. Pedersen, a codeveloper of the DSP, received the IEEE Liebmann Award.
The first digital signal processor
Jim was born in Tallassee, a small city in Alabama. He received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1971 from Auburn University, in Alabama. After earning a master’s degree in EE two years later from MIT, he returned to Auburn to pursue a Ph.D. In 1976 he received his doctorate and began a yearlong postdoctoral fellowship at Bell Labs’ acoustic research department in Holmdel.
There he programmed a refrigerator-size DSP system to do real-time de-reverberation of speech and eliminate echoes in conference-room speakerphones.
During his fellowship, he met IEEE Life Fellow Dan Stanzione, a Bell Labs group supervisor who recruited him to join the company’s first DSP design team in 1977. Stanzione, who became the eighth president of Bell Labs, said in a 2015 interview with the Computer History Museum’s oral history project that his first meeting with Jim was “a lucky day for me.” Jim arrived during the glory days of Bell Labs, when algorithm experts, semiconductor experts, and system designers worked for one company, more often than not down the hall from one another.
Prior to 1980, most signal processing applications were implemented with analog components. Advanced algorithms such as low-data-rate speech coding and speech recognition were validated in the digital domain using supercomputer simulations and were too complex to be implemented with analog designs. By contrast, digital designs used racks of components well beyond commercial feasibility. The dream of an inexpensive, high-performance digital signal processor seemed far off, as no single DSP architecture would work for all algorithms. Therefore Texas Instruments and similar companies sold universal digital building blocks such as multipliers and register files.
Stanzione’s goal was to create a widely applicable DSP that could replace his department’s custom analog filter designs. In time, the team homed in on a specific filtering application: DTMF (dual-tone multifrequency) signaling, which decoded a phone’s dial tones into the dialed number to route calls. It would be deployed by new digital systems in sufficient volume to justify the cost of developing the DSP.
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