Gottfried Ungerboeck

Gottfried Ungerboeck, born in Vienna on 15 March 1940, is an Austrian communications engineer who invented trellis coded modulation. He received an electrical engineering degree, with emphasis on telecommunications, from Vienna University of Technology in 1964 and a PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in 1970. He joined IBM Austria as a systems engineer in 1965 and the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory in 1967, where he worked on digital signal processing and switching systems and on communication and information theory. Among many contributions to the theory of data transmission, he invented trellis coded modulation. He joined Broadcom in 1998 as Technical Director for its communication business line, and his honours include IBM Fellow in 1984, the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal in 1994, the Marconi Prize in 1996 and the Claude E. Shannon Award in 2018.