Dr. Nambirajan Seshadri, senior vice president and general manager, Mobile Wireless Group, and chief technology officer, mobile platforms and wireless connectivity, was recently elected as a new member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), an honor considered among the highest of professional engineering distinctions.
NAE members are nominated and elected by their peers. Membership is awarded based on important and significant contributions to engineering theory and practice, as well as unusual accomplishments in the pioneering of new fields of technology.
Seshadri was picked for his contributions to wireless communications theory and the development of mass market wireless technology.
“Election to the NAE is among the highest recognitions that an engineer can achieve,” Broadcom Co-founder and Chief Technical Officer Dr. Henry Samueli said. “The process is extraordinarily competitive so this is quite an achievement.”
Broadcom now counts four NAE members among its engineering ranks, including Samueli, Nick Alexopoulos, vice president, antenna and RF research and university relations in the office of the CTO, and Arogyaswami Paulraj, senior technical advisor in the office of the CTO.
Seshadri is among 66 other newly elected members and 10 foreign associates named this year, bringing the total U.S. membership to 2,254 and the number of foreign associates to 206, according to the NAE’s website.
Dr. Nambirajan “Nambi” Seshadri Bio
Nambi Seshadri joined Broadcom in 1999. He was the first employee dedicated to developing the company’s wireless strategy which initially began with wireless connectivity products and subsequently entered the cellular baseband market. Both segments have evolved into stand-alone business groups.
As CTO of the Mobile Platforms and Wireless Connectivity business groups, he helped drive Broadcom’s entry into 2G and 3G cellular, mobile multimedia, low power Wi-Fi for handsets, combo chips that integrate multiple wireless connectivity technologies, GPS, 4G technologies, as well as development of a strong IPR portfolio.
Since 2011, he has served as General Manager of the Mobile Platforms Solutions business unit. This group is responsible for developing and marketing cellular baseband, RF and power management products as well as complete smart phone handset reference platforms.
Prior to joining Broadcom, he served more than 13 years with AT&T, first as a member of the technical staff in the Signal Processing Research Department of AT&T Bell Laboratories and later as Head of Communications Research at AT&T Shannon Labs.
His research has been focused on developing techniques for reliable transmission of data, speech, and audio for mobile communications. During the first few years at Bell Labs, his research collaborations resulted in novel techniques for understanding the impact of channel errors on low bit rate speech coders resulting in combined speech and channel coding and decoding solutions.
In the 1990s, he co-invented space-time trellis codes with Vahid Tarokh and Robert Calderbank and their paper on this topic won the 1999 IEEE Information Theory Society Best Paper Award. Another paper on the implementation of a modem based on space-time coding (co-authored with Tarokh, Calderbank and Ayman Naguib) was selected by IEEE Communications Society in 2002 as one of the 50 most influential works published by IEEE Communications Society in its first 50 years – The Best of Best: 50 Years of Communications and Networking Research. These and additional works on space-time codes from AT&T and other institutions resulted in the rapid establishment of space-time codes as an important area of wireless communications. He also helped drive adoption of hybrid ARQ in EDGE cellular transmission as a technique for robust link adaptation.
Nambi received a B.E. degree in Electronics and Communications from Regional Engineering College (now called NITT), Tiruchirapalli, India, and a M.S. and Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY. He is a Fellow of IEEE, Distinguished alumnus of National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirapalli, India and holds more than 75 patents.
About the NAE
The Washington, D.C., -based NAE falls under the umbrella of the National Academy of Sciences, a nonprofit organization established by congressional charter that was signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 to create an independent adviser for the U.S. government on science and technology matters. The National Academy of Engineering and Institute of Medicine followed in 1964 and 1970.
Read more about the 2012 NAE elections.
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