Lucent, Sun, and Chief H-P Scientist Joel Birnbaum to Receive IEEE Honors; Birnbaum to Address Technology Futures in Event Keynote

Business Wire, Sept 22, 2000

Business Editors

PISCATAWAY, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 22, 2000

Lucent Technologies' Optical Networking Group, Sun Microsystems, and Joel S. Birnbaum, chief scientist and retired vice president of Hewlett Packard Laboratories, are being honored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for technical innovation and leadership. The awards presentation, with a keynote address by Birnbaum, will take place on Monday, September 25, at the Hotel Pierre in New York.

Birnbaum will be presented with the 2000 IEEE Ernst Weber Engineering Leadership Recognition award. He is being honored "for leadership in integrating, extending and shaping industrial research and development in measurement, computing and communications."

Under Birnbaum's supervision, Hewlett Packard developed PA-RISC, an architecture for all of the company's computer products. As director of the HP Laboratories, he led the organization to become one of the world's premier research facilities from which numerous inventions have come, such as ink jet and laser jet printing and digital photography. Prior to joining HP in 1980, Birnbaum was the director of Computer Sciences for IBM Corporation. He is most well known for his work there in real-time data acquisition and control systems that resulted in the development of several IBM products, and in computer architecture, which led to the development of the first RISC machine.

Lucent's Optical Networking Group and Sun each will receive a 2000 IEEE Corporate Innovation Recognition award. Lucent is being honored "for pioneering, further development and first introduction of dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) optical networking systems." Dr. Jeong Kim, president of Lucent's Optical Networking Group, will accept the award for Lucent.

The award recognizes the revolutionary impact that DWDM fiber optic transmission systems, commercialized by Lucent in 1995, has had on the telecommunications and data communications industries. DWDM systems use multiple wavelengths (or colors) of light, each carrying a distinct stream of information across a single fiber strand. These systems have provided a rapid increase in information capacity and have helped satisfy the exploding bandwidth demand of long-distance carriers, driven by increasing Internet traffic.

Sun is being honored "for innovative concepts and the introduction of unique products for the processing and sharing of information." The award recognizes Sun's development of such innovative technology as engineering workstations, platforms for network computing, scalable systems, net storage, and the platform-independent Java and Jini technologies. Carl Cargill, Sun Microsystem's director of standards, will accept the award on behalf of the company.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is the world's largest technical professional society with more than 350,000 members in approximately 150 countries. Through its members, the IEEE is a leading authority on areas ranging from aerospace, computers and telecommunications to biomedicine, electric power and consumer electronics. Additional information about the IEEE can be found on the World Wide Web at www.ieee.org.