Punya Thitimajshima

Punya Thitimajshima ( Thai: ปัญญา ฐิติ มัชฌิมา; born November 9, 1955 † 9 May 2006) was a Thai information theorist, known as co- inventor of turbo codes with Claude Berrou and Alain Glavieux. He was professor of communications engineering at King Mongkut 's Institute of Technology Lat Krabang ( KMITL ).

Thitimajshima studied at KMITL and control engineering and electrical and communication engineering from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de Bretagne and the Universite de Bretagne Occidentale. He became a PhD (Systematic recursive convolutional codes and Their application to parallel concatenation ) 1993. In 1995 he was Lecturer and then Associate Professor at KMITL (Department of Telecommunications Engineering ).

In 1993 he published with Berrou and Glavieux the basic work, were introduced into the turbo code. The invention of turbo codes have revolutionized the error-correcting coding in digital information transmission and demonstrated the possibility of codes near the Shannon limit. They have been widely used for example in satellite communications (for example, from NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter ) and mobile.

In 1998 he was awarded the Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation of the IEEE Information Theory Society Claude Berrou and Alain Glavieux. In 2003 he received the award of the King of Thailand for outstanding technological achievement.

Writings

• With Berrou, Glavieux: Near Shannon limit error -correcting coding and decoding: Turbo - codes, Proceedings of IEEE International Communications Conference 1993, pdf