Bob Adams (electrical engineer) explained

Robert Whitlock Adams is a Technical Fellow at Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI) in Wilmington, Massachusetts.^[1] His focus is on signal processing and analog-to-digital conversion for professional audio.^[2] He is a leader in the development of sigma-delta converters, introducing architectural advances including mismatch shaping, multi-bit quantization, and continuous-time architectures.^[3]

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.^[4]

Awards and honors

• Elected Fellow of the Audio Engineering Society (AES), 1991^[5]
• Received AES Silver Medal Award, 1995
• Included in Electronic Design magazine's Engineering Hall of Fame, 2011^[6]
• Became a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2012 "for contributions to analog and digital signal processing"^{[7] [8]}
• Received the IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award, 2015 "for contributions to noise-shaping data converter circuits, digital signal processing, and log-domain analog filters"^[9]
• Elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering in 2018^[10] for contributions to digital storage and reproduction of high-fidelity audio.

Notes and References

1. News: Titus. Jon. Audio ADCs Hit the High Notes. 26 September 2014. ECN Magazine. Advantage Business Media. 18 March 2009.
2. News: Tuite. Don. Bob Adams: Navigating The Sigma-Delta Roadmap. 26 September 2014. Electronic Design. 3 December 2011.
3. News: Taranovich. Steve. Analog: Back to the future, part two. 26 September 2014. EDN Network. UBM Tech. 16 July 2012.
4. Adams. Robert. Nguyen. Khiem Q.. Sweetland. Karl. A 113-dB SNR Oversampling DAC with Segmented Noise-Shaped Scrambling. . December 1998. 33. 12. 1878. 10.1109/4.735526. 1998IJSSC..33.1871A. 25073383. 30 October 2014.
5. Web site: AES Awards. Audio Engineering Society. 16 October 2014.
6. Web site: Engineering Hall of Fame 2011. Electronic Design. 26 September 2014. https://web.archive.org/web/20141018212338/http://electronicdesign.com/engineering-hall-fame-2011. 2014-10-18. dead.
7. Web site: IEEE Fellows Directory. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. 26 September 2014.
8. Web site: 2012 Newly Elevated Fellows. https://web.archive.org/web/20120215201114/http://www.ieee.org/documents/fellows_class_2012.pdf. dead. February 15, 2012. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. 5 February 2018.
9. News: Olstein. K.. IEEE Fellow Robert Adams Wins 2015 Donald O. Pederson Award. 26 September 2014. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. 21 July 2014. dead. https://web.archive.org/web/20141018170046/http://sscs.ieee.org/component/content/article/11/451-ieee-fellow-robert-adams-wins-2015-donald-o-pederson-award.html. 18 October 2014.
10. Web site: Mr. Robert W. Adams . National Academy of Engineering . 21 September 2019.