Kees Schouhamer Immink | |
---|---|
Born | Kornelis Antonie Schouhamer Immink 18 December 1946 Rotterdam, Netherlands |
Alma mater | Eindhoven University of Technology |
Known for | Compact disc, DVD, Blu-ray |
Awards | Edison Medal (1999) AES Gold Medal (1999) Emmy Award (2003) SMPTE Progress Medal (2004) Faraday Medal (2015) IEEE Medal of Honor (2017) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Electronics, Information Theory |
Institutions | Turing Machines Inc Philips Research Laboratories Institute for Experimental Mathematics National University of Singapore |
Kornelis Antonie "Kees" Schouhamer Immink (born 18 December 1946 [1] ) is a Dutch engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur, who pioneered and advanced the era of digital audio, video, and data recording, including popular digital media such as compact disc (CD), DVD and Blu-ray disc. [2] [3] He has been a prolific and influential engineer, who holds more than 1100 U.S. and international patents. [4] A large portion of the commonly used audio and video playback and recording devices use technologies based on his work. [5] His contributions to coding systems assisted the digital video and audio revolution, by enabling reliable data storage at information densities previously unattainable. [5]
Immink received several tributes that summarize the impact of his contributions to the digital audio and video revolution. Among the accolades received are the IEEE Medal of Honor "for pioneering contributions to video, audio, and data recording technology, including compact disc, DVD, and Blu-ray", the Edison Medal [5] and an individual Technology Emmy award by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS). [6] [7] Beatrix, Queen of the Netherlands bestowed him a knighthood in 2000. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2007 for pioneering and advancing the era of digital audio, video, and data recording. Royal Holland Society of Arts and Sciences introduced the Kees Schouhamer Immink Prize in 2019 as a means to encourage research on information science and tele-communications. [8]
Currently, Immink holds the position of president of Turing Machines Inc, which was founded in 1998. During his career, Immink, in addition to his practical contributions, has contributed to information theory. [9] [10] He has written over 120 articles and four books, including Codes for Mass Data Storage Media. [11] [12] He has been an adjunct professor at the Institute for Experimental Mathematics, University of Duisburg and Essen, Germany, since 1994, as well as affiliated with the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) as a visiting professor.
Immink obtained an Engineer's degree (Ir.) in electrical engineering (1974, cum laude) and a PhD degree (1985) from Eindhoven University of Technology on a thesis entitled Properties and Constructions of Binary Channel Codes . [13]
Fresh from engineering school, in 1967, he joined Philips Research Labs in Eindhoven, where he spent thirty years in a fruitful association. The renowned physicist Hendrik Casimir was director of Philips Research till 1972. Immink described the atmosphere at that time: "We were able to conduct whatever research we found relevant, and had no pre-determined tasks; instead, we received full freedom and support of autonomous research. We went to work, not knowing that we would do that day. This view – or rather ambiguous view – on how research should be conducted, led to amazing inventions as a result. It was an innovation heaven". [14] Immink worked in various groups, and in 1974, he joined the research group Optics, where pioneering work was done on optical laserdisc systems. He contributed mainly to the electronics and servo technology of the video disc. [15] [16] [17] In a joint effort, MCA and Philips brought the laserdisc system to the market. Laserdisc was first available in Atlanta in 1978, two years after the VHS and four years before the CD. The Laserdisc never managed a significant presence in market share. The Philips/MCA Laserdisc operation was not successful and discontinued in 1981.
Around 1976, Philips and Sony [18] showed prototypes of digital audio disc players, which were based on optical videodisc technology. In the interview by Tekla Perry for the IEEE Spectrum, May 2017, [19] Immink explains that he got involved in the CD project at the end of 1979 when Sony and Philips had decided to jointly settle on one design. Both Philips and Sony had shown prototype CD players to the press in 1978. The team at Philips, he says, "needed someone to do measurements of the two competing systems, the quality, how they coped with scratches, how they coped with imperfections of the disc. My job with the LaserDisc was finished, so I said, 'Sure, I could do it.'" Both Philips and Sony had come up with different rules for translating digital audio data to sequences of pits and lands. After a lot of experimentation, Immink improved the playing time by thirty percent by inventing a code that could better cope with the servo systems. The encoding system Immink devised came to be called eight-to-fourteen modulation (EFM).
Immink took part in the joint Sony–Philips task force, which developed the Compact Disc standard, the Red Book. He contributed to the EFM and CIRC coding schemes. [20] [21]
In the article, "Shannon, Beethoven, and the Compact Disc", [22] Immink presents a historical review of the years leading up to the launch of the CD, and the various crucial decisions made. He refutes the urban legend that the compact disc's diameter was increased from 115 to 120 mm solely to hold the 74 minutes playing time of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. [23] Commercial disputes also played a part. [22] [24] [25]
After the CD standard was set in 1980, Immink and his co-workers conducted pioneering experiments with magneto-optical audio recording on pre-grooved discs. [26] They also found a simple method to extend the analog videodisc standard with digital sound. [27] The new systems were brought to market as MiniDisc and CD Video. Laserdiscs fabricated after 1984 have digitally encoded sound signals.
In 1993, Toshiba engineers developed the Super Density Disc, the successor of the Compact Disc. Immink was a member of the Philips and Sony task force, which developed a competing disc format, called MultiMedia CD. Immink created EFMPlus, a more efficient successor of EFM used in CD. [28] [29] [30] The electronics industry feared a repeat of the format war between VHS and Betamax in the 1980s. IBM's president, Lou Gerstner, urged them to adopt Immink's EFMPlus coding scheme as EFM has a proven record. [31] In September 1995, an agreement was made among the major industries: Philips/Sony surrendered to Toshiba's SuperDensity Disc and Toshiba accepted the EFMPlus modulation. The DVD encompasses the sound-only Super Audio CD (SACD) and DVD-audio formats, developed independently by Sony and Toshiba, which are incompatible formats for delivering very high-fidelity audio content. SACD is in a format war with DVD-Audio, but neither has yet managed to replace audio CDs.
Immediately after the DVD standard was settled in 1996, Philips and Sony, disappointed after the DVD failure, decided to develop a next-generation blue-laser-based digital video recorder (DVR), which would be positioned as DVD's high-density successor. [31] Philips and Sony set up a joint task force, where Immink and his co-workers developed DVRs, later called Blu-ray's, code design. [32] [33] [34] [35] In 2005, seven years after its design, the Blu-ray Disc was brought to market. In 2002, the DVD forum adopted an alternative format, the HD DVD. [36] The two resulting standards had significant differences that made each incompatible with the other. The blue-laser format war with Toshiba's HD DVD was settled in early 2008 when Toshiba withdrew their system effectively ending the high definition optical disc format war.
In 1985, Immink joined Philips's magnetic recording group, where he contributed to the design of coding technologies of the digital video tape recorder, DV [37] [38] and the Digital Compact Cassette (DCC). [39] [40] The DCC was short-lived: introduced in 1992 and discontinued in 1996. The DV, launched in 1994, has become a popular tape standard for home and semi-professional video production.
In 1994, Immink was named a Philips' Research Fellow, the company’s pre-eminent technical distinction. [4] He left Philips Research in 1998 [4] after 30 years of service, and founded Turing Machines Inc., where he currently serves as its president. The small research institute has been successful in creating new coding technology and has been granted around ten US patents after a joint cooperation with the Korean electronics company LG. [41]
Immink has served in officer and board positions for a number of technical societies, government and academic organizations, including the Audio Engineering Society, IEEE, Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, and several universities. He is a trustee of the Shannon Foundation, and was a governor of the IEEE Consumer Electronics and Information Theory Societies. He was on the governors board of the Audio Engineering Society for over 10 years, and was its president in 2002–2003.
His papers have received several awards:
The Royal Holland Society of Arts and Sciences established the Kees Schouhamer Immink Prize in 2019 as a means to encourage research on information science and telecommunications, two basic pillars of our information society. The prize, consisting of an honorarium and a diploma, is bestowed in recognition of a distinguished PhD thesis defended in the Netherlands. [8]
The compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. It uses the Compact Disc Digital Audio format which typically provides 74 minutes of audio on a disc. In later years, the compact disc was adapted for non-audio computer data storage purposes as CD-ROM and its derivatives. First released in Japan in October 1982, the CD was the second optical disc technology to be invented, after the much larger LaserDisc (LD). By 2007, 200 billion CDs had been sold worldwide.
In telecommunications, a line code is a pattern of voltage, current, or photons used to represent digital data transmitted down a communication channel or written to a storage medium. This repertoire of signals is usually called a constrained code in data storage systems. Some signals are more prone to error than others as the physics of the communication channel or storage medium constrains the repertoire of signals that can be used reliably.
Compact Disc Digital Audio, also known as Digital Audio Compact Disc or simply as Audio CD, is the standard format for audio compact discs. The standard is defined in the Red Book technical specifications, which is why the format is also dubbed "Redbook audio" in some contexts. CDDA utilizes pulse-code modulation (PCM) and uses a 44,100 Hz sampling frequency and 16-bit resolution, and was originally specified to store up to 74 minutes of stereo audio per disc.
MiniDisc (MD) is an erasable magneto-optical disc-based data storage format offering a capacity of 60, 74, and later, 80 minutes of digitized audio.
Super Audio CD (SACD) is an optical disc format for audio storage introduced in 1999. It was developed jointly by Sony and Philips Electronics and intended to be the successor to the compact disc (CD) format.
A CD player is an electronic device that plays audio compact discs, which are a digital optical disc data storage format. CD players were first sold to consumers in 1982. CDs typically contain recordings of audio material such as music or audiobooks. CD players may be part of home stereo systems, car audio systems, personal computers, or portable CD players such as CD boomboxes. Most CD players produce an output signal via a headphone jack or RCA jacks. To use a CD player in a home stereo system, the user connects an RCA cable from the RCA jacks to a hi-fi and loudspeakers for listening to music. To listen to music using a CD player with a headphone output jack, the user plugs headphones or earphones into the headphone jack.
A magneto-optical drive is a kind of optical disc drive capable of writing and rewriting data upon a magneto-optical disc. 130 mm (5.25 in) and 90 mm (3.5 in) discs are the most common sizes.
Run-length limited or RLL coding is a line coding technique that is used to send arbitrary data over a communications channel with bandwidth limits. RLL codes are defined by four main parameters: m, n, d, k. The first two, m/n, refer to the rate of the code, while the remaining two specify the minimal d and maximal k number of zeroes between consecutive ones. This is used in both telecommunication and storage systems that move a medium past a fixed recording head.
The Rainbow Books are a collection of CD format specifications, generally written and published by the companies involved in their development, including Philips, Sony, Matsushita and JVC, among others.
A format war is a competition between similar but mutually incompatible technical standards that compete for the same market, such as for data storage devices and recording formats for electronic media. It is often characterized by political and financial influence on content publishers by the developers of the technologies. Developing companies may be characterized as engaging in a format war if they actively oppose or avoid interoperable open-industry technical standards in favor of their own.
In digital recording, an audio or video signal is converted into a stream of discrete numbers representing the changes over time in air pressure for audio, or chroma and luminance values for video. This number stream is saved to a storage device. To play back a digital recording, the numbers are retrieved and converted back into their original analog audio or video forms so that they can be heard or seen.
Eight-to-fourteen modulation (EFM) is a data encoding technique – formally, a line code – used by compact discs (CD), laserdiscs (LD) and pre-Hi-MD MiniDiscs. EFMPlus is a related code, used in DVDs and Super Audio CDs (SACDs).
James T. Russell is an American inventor. He earned a BA in physics from Reed College in Portland in 1953. He joined General Electric's nearby labs in Richland, Washington, where he initiated many types of experimental instrumentation. He designed and built the first electron beam welder.
Sound recording and reproduction is the electrical, mechanical, electronic, or digital inscription and re-creation of sound waves, such as spoken voice, singing, instrumental music, or sound effects. The two main classes of sound recording technology are analog recording and digital recording.
The DVD is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any kind of digital data and has been widely used to store video programs, software and other computer files. DVDs offer significantly higher storage capacity than compact discs (CD) while having the same dimensions. A standard single-layer DVD can store up to 4.7 GB of data, a dual-layer DVD up to 8.5 GB. Variants can store up to a maximum of 17.08 GB.
A CD-ROM is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data computers can read, but not write or erase. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold both computer data and audio with the latter capable of being played on a CD player, while data is only usable on a computer.
The history of optical recording can be divided into a few number of distinct major contributions. The pioneers of optical recording worked mostly independently, and their solutions to the many technical challenges have very distinctive features, such as
Toshitada Doi is a Japanese electrical engineer, who played a significant role in the digital audio revolution. He received a degree in electrical engineering from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1964, and a PhD from Tohoku University in 1972.
The Sony CDP-101 was the world's first commercially released compact disc player. The system was launched in Japan on October 1, 1982 at a list price of 168,000 yen.
The Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium or NatLab was the Dutch section of the Philips research department, which did research for the product divisions of that company.
An international collaboration between Philips and the Sony Corporation lead to the creation of the compact disc. The author explains how it came about
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(help)DC-free runlength limited codes have been the cornerstone of all three generations of optical recording, CD, DVD and BD.
This paper proposes a general and systematic code design method to efficiently combine constrained codes with parity-check codes for optical recording.
We analyze codes for DNA-based data storage which accounts for the maximum homopolymer repetition length and GC-AT balance.
The prior art construction of sets of balanced codewords by Knuth is attractive for its simplicity and absence of look-up tables, but the redundancy of the balanced codes generated by Knuth's algorithm falls a factor of two short with respect to the minimum required.
The performance of certain transmission and storage channels, such as optical data storage and non-volatile memory, is seriously hampered by the phenomena of unknown offset (drift) or gain.
We report on 20 years of development of codes for optical disk recording systems. A description of the state-of-the-art and feasible options for future extensions and improvements are given.
Constrained codes are a key component in digital recording devices that have become ubiquitous in computer data storage and electronic entertainment applications.
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)Coding techniques are used in communication systems to increase the efficiency of the channel.