Ulrich L. Rohde, N1UL, of Synergy Microwave Corp was invited to deliver the sixth Sir J.C. Bose Memorial Lecture at the IEEE Hyderabad Section on December 2 during a joint session of the IEEE MTT, AP, and EMC Societies in Hyderabad, India. Rohde’s talk was “Next Generation Networks: Software Defined Radio — Emerging Trends.” Click here to view a collection of slides used in the lecture.

While working under a US Department of Defense contract at RCA in 1982, Rohde’s department developed the first SDR, which used the COSMAC (Complementary Symmetry Monolithic Array Computer) chip. Introduced by RCA in early 1976, the RCA CDP1802 eight-bit CMOS microprocessor — a 40-pin LSI integrated circuit chip — was the company’s first single-chip microprocessor. Rohde was among the first to present publicly on this topic with his February 1984 talk, “Digital HF Radio: A Sampling of Techniques” at the Third International Conference on HF Communication Systems and Techniques in London.

The Hyderabad lecture’s namesake, Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, was a Bengali scientist who lived in British India in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was an expert in math, physics, biology, and archaeology. Bose pioneered the investigation of radio and microwave optics, contributed significantly to plant science, and laid the foundations of experimental science.

Much of Bose’s original scientific work was in the area of microwaves. He produced extremely short radio waves and was the first to use a semiconductor junction to detect radio waves. Bose’s research on the response of tissues to microwaves and other stimuli led to many significant findings in that field, and the IEEE named him one of the fathers of radio science. — Thanks to Microwave Journal