Claude Berrou is a French Professor in the Electronics Department at École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de Bretagne now called Telecom Bretagne, in Brest, France.
In the early 80’s, his research activities were in microelectronics, especially in VLSI technology and design. Some years later he took interest in the field of higher performance digital communications, especially error control coding and decoding, introducing the concept of probabilistic feedback in decoding.
This led to his inventions of ground-breaking quasi-optimal error corrections coding technique called Turbo codes. The original patent for Turbo Codes was issued in the US and the 1993 paper “Near Shannon Limit Error Correcting Coding and Decoding Turbo Codes” at ICC was its first public disclosure. In this conference presentation, the error performance of Turbo Codes was shown to be far superior than any error control technique known at the time, and hence it was received with a bit of skepticism and disbelief.
In fact, using rather short constraint length convolutional codes connected in parallel, the performance of Turbo-Coding was superior to any usual technique using much longer codes; approaching in a practical way the performance limit promised by the Shannon Theory. The scepticisms quickly disappeared soon after as the Turbo Technique results were duplicated independently by many researchers and many laboratories in the world. Turbo coding and decoding became an instant success, and this disruptive invention gave rise to intense activities in both theoretical analysis and practical applications all over the world.
Dr Berrou pioneered the extension of the Turbo principles to joint detection and decoding processing, known as Turbo detection and Turbo equalization. Turbo Codes have been used in all the major communications standards including the LTE cellular protocol for 3G.
Dr Berrou is the author or coauthor of a large number of patents and publications in the field of communications, electronics and informational neuroscience.
His distinctions are numerous and they are prestigious. To name a few of them:
The SEE Ampere Medal
The Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovations for the IEEE Information Theory Society
The IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal
The Grand Prix France Telecom of Académie des Sciences
The Marconi Prize
IEEE Fellow
SEE Fellow
In 2007, he was elected a member of the very prestigious French Academy of Sciences
And now, to this prestigious list, we are very proud indeed to add the Hall of Fame Award of Vehicular Technology Society.