Robert Whitlock Adams is a Technical Fellow at Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI) in Wilmington, Massachusetts. His focus is on signal processing and analog-to-digital conversion for professional audio. He is a leader in the development of sigma-delta converters, introducing architectural advances including mismatch shaping, multi-bit quantization, and continuous-time architectures.
Adams graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Tufts University in 1976. 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. 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), and he created ADI's sigmaDSP line of audio-specific digital signal processing cores.
As of 1998, Adams had received 15 patents related to audio signal processing.
Awards and honors
- Elected Fellow of the Audio Engineering Society (AES), 1991
- Received AES Silver Medal Award, 1995
- Included in Electronic Design magazine's Engineering Hall of Fame, 2011
- Became a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2012 "for contributions to analog and digital signal processing"
- Received the IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award, 2015 "for contributions to noise-shaping data converter circuits, digital signal processing, and log-domain analog filters"
- Elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering in 2018 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. Archived from the original (PDF) on February 15, 2012. Retrieved 5 February 2018.
- "Mr. Robert W. Adams". National Academy of Engineering. Retrieved 21 September 2019.
- Living people
- 20th-century American engineers
- 21st-century American engineers
- 20th-century American inventors
- 21st-century American inventors
- American audio engineers
- Analog electronics engineers
- Fellows of the IEEE
- Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering
- Tufts University School of Engineering alumni