Concept
Claude Berrou (klod bɛʁu; born 23 September 1951 in Penmarch) is a French professor in electrical engineering at École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de Bretagne, now IMT Atlantique. He is the sole inventor of a groundbreaking quasi-optimal error-correcting coding scheme called Turbo codes as evidenced by the sole inventorship credit given on the fundamental patent for turbo codes. The original patent filing for turbo codes issued in the US as US Patent 5,446,747. A 1993 paper entitled "Near Shannon Limit Error-correcting Coding and Decoding: Turbo-codes" published in the Proceedings of IEEE International Communications Conference was the first public disclosure of turbo codes. This 1993 paper listed three authors because it was formed from three separate submissions that were combined due to space constraints. The three authors listed on the 1993 paper are: Berrou, Glavieux, and Thitimajshima. Because the 1993 paper was the first public introduction of turbo codes (patents remain unpublished until issued), coinventorship credit for the discovery to turbo code is often erroneously given to Glavieux and/or Thitimajshima. While Berrou and Glavieux did go on to do supplemental work together, the original development of turbo codes was performed by Berrou alone. Berrou also codeveloped turbo equalization (see turbo equalizer.) Turbo equalization is also known as iterative reception or iterative detection. Turbo Codes have been used in all the major cellular communications standards since 3G and are currently part of the LTE (Long Term Evolution) cellular protocol. They are also used in the Inmarsat satellite communications protocol and well as the DVB-RCS and DVB-RCS2 communications protocols. Hard disk drives started using turbo equalization for their read channel in 2008. By 2012 all hard disk drives used turbo equalization and this remains the case to this day. In 2009, he was elected as an IEEE fellow for invention of turbo codes, generalization of the turbo principle in receivers, and influence in standardization.