One of the joys of attending a research university like Rice is the frequent exposure to The next new thing.

Ray Simar ’83 vividly remembers the day he got an early peek at the digital revolution—today a multibillion-dollar market of high-tech products ranging from digital cell phones and camcorders to compact disc players and medical imaging equipment.

“ I was pursuing a master’s degree in electrical engineering and sitting in my first graduate class with C. Sidney Burrus, then professor of circuit communications and control,” Simar says. “Although it was more than two decades ago, I can still see him standing in front of the room and telling us, ‘Imagine a technology where you can grab a piece of data—like temperature, pressure, a video image, or even the sound of a human voice—and hold it, and do whatever you want with it. Store it or erase it. Add to it or multiply it. You can even reorder bits of data and play them forward or backward instantly—anything you desire or can imagine.’ This was all very theoretical work at the time, but we were pretty excited. We bought into his vision.”

Burrus, now dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering, was telling his class about the possibilities for digital signal processing (DSP), a huge, but often arcane field he and other Rice professors helped to pioneer. They employed mathematical algorithms to convert real-world analog sounds and images into the binary language of digital computing. When digital data was married to high-speed semiconductors in the early 1980s, largely at Texas Instruments (TI), the potential for integrating digital capabilities into everyday products suddenly became feasible. TI and Rice worked together to iron out numerous technical issues and develop some of the first practical applications of the technology, including hard disk drives, robotic controls, and voice compression and decompression used now in all digital cell phones.

By the 1990s, the digital revolution had exploded. Today, there’s a bit of Rice algorithmic wizardry in virtually every piece of digital equipment on Earth. Simar, now a TI fellow and manager of the company’s architecture team for advanced DSP chips, adds a philosophical note: “DSP is a technology people use almost every day, yet they will never know anything about it or even where it came from. It’s just so esoteric.”

Although the science and engineering that produced DSP may never be fully appreciated by consumers, it certainly has made a lasting impression on TI and Rice. The benefits to both have been enormous. TI has become the world leader in the development and manufacture of DSP and analog semiconductors, its core business. In 2002, TI had operations in 25 countries and sales of $8.4 billion.

Scores of Rice graduates have interned at TI—mainly at the company’s nearby Stafford plant or at corporate offices in Dallas—and joined its workforce. Many are now on the company’s senior technical and executive staff. TI, wanting to reward Rice for contributions to its success, made headlines in 1996 with a $7-million educational investment in the university’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The money enabled construction of the TI Wing in Duncan Hall, now hub of most DSP activity at Rice, and endowed the TI Visiting Professorship and TI Graduate Fellows programs. The financial support doubled the number of M.S. and Ph.D. candidates in DSP and continues to help Rice set the pace in the U.S. for DSP research and education. More than 500 Rice DSP graduates have become leaders worldwide in industry, government, and academia.

In 1999, and again in 2002, TI gave $1-million grants to Rice for its participation in the TI DSP Leadership University—a collaborative research program with Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Georgia Tech to advance the digital future. TI shares insights to market needs with the schools, then works closely with professors and young researchers to boost the performance of existing DSP products and develop cutting-edge new ones, such as face-recognition technology and wireless video transmission. The digital age, still in its infancy, offers years of research and scholarship ahead.