James Spilker
James Julius Spilker Jr. ( August 4, 1933 - September 24, 2019 ) was an American telecommunications engineer and one of the developers of GPS .
Spilker studied electrical engineering at Stanford University with a bachelor's degree in 1955, a master's degree in 1956 and a doctorate in 1958. He then went to the Lockheed Research Labs, where he dealt with signal time technology for satellite positioning, later an essential requirement for GPS . He also developed communication technology for the transport planes of the Berlin blockade. From 1963 he was involved in the development of the first military satellite communication system at Ford Aerospace. At the invitation of Bradford W. Parkinson , he came to Stanford University in the early 1970s and was involved in the development of the original GPS architecture and designed the civil signal of GPS (L1 c / A code). In 1973 he was one of the founders of Stanford Telecommunications, where they transmitted GPS to code division multiple access (CDMA), which was eventually adopted as the standard in civil use by GPS (and by the US Air Force). It was the first of three Silicon Valley companies he founded. He was its CEO and expanded it to a company with 1,300 employees by the time it was sold in 1999. Spilker's delay-locked loop, developed in 1961, came into play when tracking the CDMA signals , which was also essential for the accuracy of GPS. He also developed the receivers for the GPS system. In 1985 he received a management degree from the University of California, Los Angeles .
From 2001 to 2005 he was a professor at Stanford University and in 2005 he co-founded the Stanford University Center for Position, Navigation and Time. He was the chief developer of the civil GPS signal L5 (in use from 2011) with higher accuracy and better protection against disruptive influences from space ( space weather ). He was also one of the developers of the Split Spectrum Mode (with Binary Offset Carrier, BOC) to separate civil and military GPS signals and developed Adaptive Vector Tracking (simultaneous signal location from several satellites), a technique that was important in expanding the GPS satellite system is.
In 2006 he was co-founder and CEO of AOSense, which develops inertial navigation with atomic beam interferometry. The third company he co-founded was Rosum, which developed indoor positioning using TV signals and GPS.
He was the editor and one of the authors of a standard work on GPS that appeared in 1996.
In 2012, he and his wife Anna Marie, a real estate agent and businesswoman, donated a building for Stanford University (The James and Anna Marie Spilker Engineering and Applied Sciences Building) and a professorship for $ 28 million.
He was a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering . In 1999 he received the Kepler Award and in 2015 the IEEE Edison Medal .
In 2019 he received the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for contributions to GPS with Bradford W. Parkinson, Hugo Fruehauf and Richard Schwartz . Spiker died in 2019 at the age of 86.
Fonts
- Digital Communications by Satellite, Prentice-Hall, 1977
- Editor with Branford W. Parkinson: Global Positioning System: Theory and Applications, 2 volumes, American Institute of Aeronautics & Astronautics (AIAA) 1996 (received the AIAA Sommerfield Book Award)
Web links
- GPS Lab at Stanford
- Queen Elizabeth Price for Engineering 2019 for Spilker
Individual evidence
- ↑ Obituary: Professor James Spilker, Jr. Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation, accessed September 30, 2019 .
- ↑ Andrew Myers: James Spilker, Jr., a father of GPS, has died at 86. Stanford Engineering, October 2, 2019, accessed October 3, 2019 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Spilker, James |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Spilker, James Julius |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American engineer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 4th August 1933 |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 24, 2019 |