The 2003 Benjamin Franklin medal in electrical engineering presented to Bishnu S. Atal

Dr. Atal was chosen for his fundamental contributions to speech coding in digital cellular telephony—specifically for pioneering work in linear predictive coding (LPC) and use of analysis-by-synthesis leading to multi-pulse excited linear predictive coding and code excited linear predictive coding (CELP). These are the basis of time-division and code-division cellular systems (TDMA & CDMA), the Nextel system, and the global system for mobile communications (GSM).