Professor John M. Cioffi

(2006) Professor Stanford University

John M. Cioffi a prolific inventor whose pioneering research helped create DSL (digital subscriber line) circuits bringing broadband Internet access to hundreds of millions of people, was named the 2006 Marconi Fellow.

Born and educated in Illinois, Cioffi earned a BSEE at Illinois ( Champaign) in 1978 and joined Bell Laboratories in New Jersey as a modem designer. During the six years he worked for Bell Laboratories, he also attended Stanford University and earned a PhD.

Cioffi left Bell Labs to work at IBM as a disk read-channel researcher. Two years later, Stanford hired him as an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering. His controversial and visionary research there attracted private funding matched by a grant from the National Science Foundation, which allowed Cioffi and his graduate research team to pursue development of Discrete Multitone Transmission (DMT), technology that led to the development of Cioffi�s breakthrough DSL modem. Cioffi was just 35 years old when he founded Amati Corporation to develop and manufacture the new modems.

Cioffi returned to Stanford, although he remained involved with Amati as an officer and director until its 1998 purchase by Texas Instruments. He currently serves as the Hitachi America Professor of Engineering at Stanford, and his continued research has led to over 100 publications and 80 patents issued or pending.

Recently, Cioffi took a leave from Stanford to lead a team exploring Dynamic Spectrum Management (DSM), a recent improvement on DSL that eliminates service interruption due to cross-talk and other common household ("impulse") noises, enables more reliable data rates, and offers a larger mix of symmetric and asymmetric service. Based on this new technology, he founded and chairs a new venture, ASSIA, Inc. which provides centralized management of DSL services for phone companies.

Cioffi is a IEEE Fellow and received the 1991 IEEE Communications Magazine Best Paper Award and the 1995 T1 Outstanding Achievement Award of the American National Standards Institute. An NSF Presidential Investigator from 1987-1992, he currently is a member of the National Academy of Engineering's Network Systems and Communications Panel. He sits on the boards of directors of ClariPhy Communications, Inc., Teranetics Communications, and on the advisory boards of Amicus, Wavion and Portview Ventures.