Zurich researcher receives IBM's highest technical honor

Zurich, Switzerland, 25 May 2005 — IBM announced today that five employees will be named IBM Fellow — the company's most prestigious technical honor — among them Dr. Evangelos Eleftheriou of the Zurich Research Laboratory. The five honorees drive innovation in areas as diverse as nanotechnology, computer design and data storage.

There have been only 185 IBM Fellows in the past 42 years, including 61 active employees with the newly-named Fellows. IBM Fellows are given freedom and flexibility to pursue creative achievements and typically work on special projects or research initiatives that lead the company in exciting new directions.

Evangelos Eleftheriou, whose pioneering work in recording and communications techniques established new standards of performance in hard disk drive technology, heads the Storage Technologies group of the Zurich Research Laboratory. He has published more than 90 papers and four book chapters, and holds 25 US patents. His work has been honored numerous times. In 2003, he was co-recipient of the prestigious 2003 IEEE Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham Prize in the field of Communications Systems, and in 2001, he was elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for the invention of noise-predictive maximum likelihood sequence detection.

He is most noted for his work on reduced-state sequence detection/decoding in conjunction with noise prediction for magnetic recording and filtered multi-tone modulation techniques for communications systems. His concept of "Noise-Predictive Maximum Likelihood" (NPML) detection has become the core of a new architecture developed for the read channel of hard-disk drives (HDD), and has since become the de facto industry standard. Its deployment in IBM and Hitachi HDD read channels led to an increase of linear density of more than 50% over that of conventional methods. NPML read-channel modules have shipped in server-class, desktop, and mobile HDDs as well as in the Microdrive.

Over the years, Evangelos Eleftheriou's research has covered a wide variety of subjects, ranging from communications and information theory to signal processing and coding for transmission and recording systems. His current research is focused on advanced signal processing, coding, and servo control techniques for improving the reliability and performance of tape systems, as well as for increasing their areal density and storage capacity. With his team he is also currently exploring alternative storage technologies based on nanotechnology. Specifically, these novel storage technologies are atomic force microscopy (AFM)-based probe-storage techniques, better known as "millipede".

Evangelos Eleftheriou received a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Patras in Greece in 1979, and M.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees, also in Electrical Engineering, from Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, in 1981 and 1985, respectively. He joined IBM Research in 1986.

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