Dr. Victor Lawrence was Vice President of Communications Technology Research at Lucent Bell Laboratories where he managed an R&D staff of over 500 technologist responsible for the development of technologies for worldwide communications networks.
Dr. Lawrence has been a key proponent of R&D globalization and is championing the effort to bring fiber optic connectivity to Africa. Over the past several years at Bell Labs, he managed a worldwide R&D organization, with branches in Beijing and Shanghai in China and in Hilversum and Twente in the Netherlands, as well as four states in the US. Before joining Bell Labs in 1974, he taught at Kumasi University of Science and Technology in Ghana, and was employed as a research engineer at the General Electric Company in the UK. Since 1996, Dr. Lawrence has taught a short-course each year at the US Industrial College of the Armed Forces. From 1997-2001, Dr. Lawrence and his staff supported Senator Frist and the US Sub-Committee on Science and Technology.
Dr. Lawrence spun off several ventures internal and external to Lucent to maximize the impact of technology developed in his organization.
Globespan, whose core team came from Dr. Lawrence’s organization and created the silicon for DSL. Globespan later merged with Virata and is now part of Conexant.
Lucent Digital Video, a Lucent internal venture, which developed MPEG-2 video encoders that have been deployed in over 150 television stations and in many broadband networks worldwide. The entire R&D team came from Dr. Lawrence’s organization.
elemedia, which developed software for VoIP communications.
Lucent Digital Radio (now Ubiquity), which developed VLSI for encoding/decoding and modulation/demodulation of digital audio broadcast (DAB). This technology is now used for both terrestrial and satellite radio.
In addition, he led the systems engineering efforts that designed the architecture for the Sirius Satellite System and developed the Studio Encoder and the ASIC for the receiver system.
During his career, his personal R&D activities have provided major contributions to gigabit, photonic, and wireless networking, signal processing, modem technology, digital techniques, ATM switching and protocols, DSL, speech and audio coding, among other areas. His application of digital signal processing to data communications in the late 1980s and early 1990s led to many significant advances in high-speed transmission over copper lines (e.g., voiceband modems and DSL), and to the creation of Globespan Semiconductor Inc..He was an early champion of VLSI for ATM/IP networks and helped to create two generations of ATM/IP silicon, including the industry leading ATLANTA ATM/IP chip set. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering
