2017 Leadership Award

The Leadership Award (formerly Forum International Achievement Award) is presented to an individual, group of individuals, or organization that made especially significant contributions in furthering the global mission of the Wireless Innovation Forum. This year’s award goes to Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Dr. h.c. mult. Ulrich L. Rohde, partner of Rohde & Schwarz GmbH & Co., KG, Munich, and chairman of Synergy Microwave Corp., Paterson, New Jersey. Dr. Rohde is a prolific technical author, engineer, businessman and amateur radio operator. He studied microwave and RF in Munich, Darmstadt and New York, graduated from the TU Berlin with a Dr.-Ing. and from the BTU Cottbus with a Dr.-Ing. habil. He was in charge of the Rohde & Schwarz office in the United States, and then was general manager of RCA Radio Group for communications and radio intelligence. 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. Dr. Rohde was one of the first to present publicly on this topic with his February 1985 talk entitled, “Digital HF Radio: A Sampling of Techniques” at the Third International Conference on HF Communication Systems and Techniques in London. Since then Dr. Rohde has actively driven innovation in the field of SDR, both in industry and academia. He has founded several companies in the field of microwave CAD technology and for developing and manufacturing microwave components. Since 1977, he has been professor of electrical engineering at the University of Florida, Gainesville, and since 1982, he has been adjunct professor of electrical engineering at George Washington University, Washington, D.C. In addition to other academic commitments, Dr. Rohde is honorary professor at the University of Cottbus, honorary member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich, and honorary senator at Federal Armed Forces University, Munich, and is a member of the Center of Excellence at this last university. He has published six monographs and in excess of 100 peer-reviewed papers. He is the proprietor of roughly 50 patents. In March 2014 Dr. Rohde gave a keynote on “Microwave Receiver and Design Principles” at the SDR-WInnComm 2014 in Schaumburg. In December 2016, Dr. Rohde was invited to deliver at IEEE Hyderabad the prestigious Sir J. C. Bose Memorial Lecture on “Next-Generation Networks: Software-Defined Radio - Emerging Trends.” In the 2017 edition of the book on “Communications Receivers,” Dr. Rohde and his co-authors set SDR at the core of modern communications systems design.

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