Kornelis Antonie "Kees" Schouhamer Immink (born 18 December 1946) is a Dutch engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur, who pioneered and advanced the era of digital audio, video, and data recording, including popular digital media such as
compact disc (CD),
DVD and
Blu-ray disc.[1] He has been a prolific and influential engineer, who holds more than 1100 U.S. and international patents.[2]
A large portion of the commonly used audio and video playback and recording devices use technologies based on his work.[3] His contributions to coding systems assisted the digital video and audio revolution, by enabling reliable data storage at information densities previously unattainable.[3]
Immink received several tributes that summarize the impact of his contributions to the digital audio and video revolution. Among the accolades received are the
IEEE Medal of Honor "for pioneering contributions to video, audio, and data recording technology, including compact disc, DVD, and Blu-ray", the
Edison Medal[3] and an individual Technology Emmy award by the
National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS).[4][5]Beatrix,
Queen of the
Netherlands bestowed him a knighthood in 2000. He was elected a member of the
National Academy of Engineering in 2007 for pioneering and advancing the era of digital audio, video, and data recording.
Royal Holland Society of Arts and Sciences introduced the Kees Schouhamer Immink Prize in 2019 as a means to encourage research on information science and tele-communications.[6]
Fresh from engineering school, in 1967, he joined
Philips Research Labs in
Eindhoven, where he spent thirty years in a fruitful association. The renowned physicist
Hendrik Casimir was director of Philips Research till 1972. Immink described the atmosphere at that time: "We were able to conduct whatever research we found relevant, and had no pre-determined tasks; instead, we received full freedom and support of autonomous research. We went to work, not knowing that we would do that day. This view – or rather ambiguous view – on how research should be conducted, led to amazing inventions as a result. It was an innovation heaven".[12] Immink worked in various groups, and in 1974, he joined the research group Optics, where pioneering work was done on optical
laserdisc systems. He contributed mainly to the
electronics and
servo technology of the video disc.[13][14][15] In a joint effort,
MCA and Philips brought the laserdisc system to the market. Laserdisc was first available in
Atlanta in 1978, two years after the
VHS and four years before the
CD. The Laserdisc never managed a significant presence in market share. The Philips/MCA Laserdisc operation was not successful and discontinued in 1981.
Compact Disc
Around 1976, Philips and Sony[16] showed prototypes of digital audio disc players, which were based on optical
videodisc technology. In the interview by Tekla Perry for the
IEEE Spectrum, May 2017,[17] Immink explains that he got involved in the CD project at the end of 1979 when Sony and Philips had decided to jointly settle on one design. Both Philips and Sony had shown prototype CD players to the press in 1978. The team at Philips, he says, "needed someone to do measurements of the two competing systems, the quality, how they coped with scratches, how they coped with imperfections of the disc. My job with the
LaserDisc was finished, so I said, 'Sure, I could do it.'" Both Philips and Sony had come up with different rules for translating digital audio data to sequences of pits and lands. After a lot of experimentation, Immink improved the playing time by thirty percent by inventing a code that could better cope with the servo systems. The encoding system Immink devised came to be called
eight-to-fourteen modulation (EFM).
In the article, "Shannon, Beethoven, and the Compact Disc",[20] Immink presents a historical review of the years leading up to the launch of the CD, and the various crucial decisions made. He refutes the urban legend that the compact disc's diameter was increased from 115 to 120 mm solely to hold the 74 minutes playing time of
Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony conducted by
Wilhelm Furtwängler.[21] Commercial disputes also played a part.[20][22][23]
After the CD standard was set in 1980, Immink and his co-workers conducted pioneering experiments with
magneto-optical audio recording on pre-grooved discs.[24] They also found a simple method to extend the analog
videodisc standard with digital sound.[25] The new systems were brought to market as
MiniDisc and
CD Video.
Laserdiscs fabricated after 1984 have digitally encoded sound signals.
DVD and Blu-ray Disc
In 1993,
Toshiba engineers developed the
Super Density Disc, the successor of the
Compact Disc. Immink was a member of the
Philips and
Sony task force, which developed a competing disc format, called MultiMedia CD. Immink created
EFMPlus, a more efficient successor of
EFM used in
CD.[26][27][28] The electronics industry feared a repeat of the format war between
VHS and
Betamax in the 1980s. IBM's president,
Lou Gerstner, urged them to adopt Immink's EFMPlus coding scheme as EFM has a proven record.[29] In September 1995, an agreement was made among the major industries: Philips/Sony surrendered to Toshiba's SuperDensity Disc and Toshiba accepted the
EFMPlus modulation. The DVD encompasses the sound-only
Super Audio CD (SACD) and
DVD-audio formats, developed independently by
Sony and
Toshiba, which are incompatible formats for delivering very
high-fidelity audio content. SACD is in a
format war with
DVD-Audio, but neither has yet managed to replace audio CDs.
Immediately after the DVD standard was settled in 1996, Philips and Sony, disappointed after the DVD failure, decided to develop a next-generation blue-
laser-based
digital video recorder (DVR), which would be positioned as DVD's high-density successor.[29] Philips and Sony set up a joint task force, where Immink and his co-workers developed DVRs, later called
Blu-ray's, code design.[30][31][32][33] In 2005, seven years after its design, the Blu-ray Disc was brought to market. In 2002, the
DVD forum adopted an alternative format, the
HD DVD.[34] The two resulting standards had
significant differences that made each incompatible with the other. The blue-laser
format war with Toshiba's
HD DVD was settled in early 2008 when Toshiba withdrew their system effectively ending the
high definition optical disc format war.
DV and DCC
In 1985, Immink joined Philips's
magnetic recording group, where he contributed to the design of coding technologies of the digital video tape recorder,
DV[35][36] and the
Digital Compact Cassette (DCC).[37][38] The DCC was short-lived: introduced in 1992 and discontinued in 1996. The
DV, launched in 1994, has become a popular tape standard for home and semi-professional video production.
Turing Machines
After more than thirty years, Immink left
Philips Research in 1998, and founded Turing Machines Inc., where he currently serves as its president. The small research institute has been successful in creating new coding technology and has been granted around ten US patents.[39]
IEEE Chester Sall Consumer Electronics Award, For DC-free Multimode Code Design Using Novel Selection Criteria for Optical Recording Systems, (co-recipient with Jun Lee), 2011,[44][45]
AES Gold Medal awarded by the
Audio Engineering Society, for significant contributions to the advancement of consumer audio technology (
USA, 1999)
IEEE
Edison Medal, for a career of creative contributions to the technologies of digital video, audio, and data recording. (
USA, 1999)[49]
Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation awarded by the
IEEE Information Theory Society, for the invention of constrained codes for commercial recording systems (
USA, 1998)[50]
AES 50th Anniversary Commemorative Medal awarded by the Audio Engineering Society (
USA, 1998)
Alexander M. Poniatoff Gold Medal Award for Technical Excellence awarded by the
Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, for outstanding contributions to the development of new techniques and/or equipment that have contributed to the advancement of audio or video magnetic recording and reproduction (
USA, 1994)
2009 Chester Sall Award for ‘’DC-free Multimode Code Design Using Novel Selection Criteria for Optical Recording Systems,’’ IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics (Co-recipient with Jun Lee).[53]
2008 Best Paper Award for ‘’A general construction of constrained parity-check codes for optical recording,’’ 2008
IEEE Communications Society, Data Storage Technical Committee in Signal Processing and Coding for Data Storage (Co-recipient with Kui Cai) ).[54]
Selected literature
Codes for mass data storage systems, Shannon Foundation Publishers, 2004 (three editions) [9]
Efficient balanced and maximum homopolymer-run restricted block codes for DNA-based data storage, IEEE Commun. Letters, 2019 (with Kui Cai) )[55]
Very efficient balanced codes, IEEE Journal Sel. Areas on Communications, 2010 (with Jos Weber).[56]
Minimum Pearson Distance Detection for Multilevel Channels With Gain and/or Offset Mismatch, IEEE Trans. Information Theory, 2014 (with Jos Weber).[57]
A Survey of Coding Techniques for Optical Disc Recording, IEEE Journal Sel. Areas on Communications, 2001)[58]
Codes for Digital Recorders, IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, 1998 (with Paul Siegel and Jack Wolf)[59]
The Digital Versatile Disc (
DVD): System Requirements and Channel Coding,
SMPTE Journal, 1996.[36]
Experiments Toward an Erasable
Compact Disc, (with J. Braat), J. Audio Eng. Soc., 1984.[24]
KHMW Schouhamer Immink Prijs
The
Royal Holland Society of Arts and Sciences established the Kees Schouhamer Immink Prize in 2019 as a means to encourage research on information science and telecommunications, two basic pillars of our information society. The prize, consisting of an honorarium and a diploma, is bestowed in recognition of a distinguished PhD thesis defended in the Netherlands.[6]
^
abK. A. Schouhamer Immink (2018).
"How we made the compact disc". Nature Electronics. 1. Retrieved 16 April 2018. An international collaboration between Philips and the Sony Corporation lead to the creation of the compact disc. The author explains how it came about
^K. A. S. Immink and J. Kahlman. "Channel code with embedded pilot tracking tones for DVC-R, IEEE Trans. Consumer Electronics, vol. CE-41, no. 1, p. 180, 1995".
doi:
10.1109/30.370325. {{
cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (
help)
^K. A. S. Immink and G. van den Enden. "A Comparison of Rotary-and Stationary-Head Video Tape Recorders, IEEE Trans. Consumer Electr., vol. CE-42, p. 998, Nov. 1996".
doi:
10.1109/30.555805. {{
cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (
help)
^K. A. Schouhamer Immink and J. H. Weber (2010).
"Very efficient balanced codes". IEEE Journal Sel. Areas on Communications. 28. Retrieved 16 April 2021. The prior art construction of sets of balanced codewords by Knuth is attractive for its simplicity and absence of look-up tables, but the redundancy of the balanced codes generated by Knuth's algorithm falls a factor of two short with respect to the minimum required.
^K. A. Schouhamer Immink and J. H. Weber (2014).
"Minimum Pearson Distance Detection for Multilevel Channels With Gain and/or Offset Mismatch". IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. 60. Retrieved 16 April 2021. The performance of certain transmission and storage channels, such as optical data storage and non-volatile memory, is seriously hampered by the phenomena of unknown offset (drift) or gain.
^K. A. Schouhamer Immink (2001).
"A Survey of Coding Techniques for Optical Disc Recording". IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. 19. Retrieved 16 April 2021. We report on 20 years of development of codes for optical disk recording systems. A description of the state-of-the-art and feasible options for future extensions and improvements are given.
^Kees Schouhamer Immink, Paul H. Siegel, and
Jack Wolf (1999).
"Codes for Digital Recorders". IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. 44. Retrieved 16 April 2021. Constrained codes are a key component in digital recording devices that have become ubiquitous in computer data storage and electronic entertainment applications.{{
cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (
link)
^K. A. Schouhamer Immink (1990).
"Runlength-Limited Sequences". Proceedings of the IEEE. 78. Retrieved 16 April 2021. Coding techniques are used in communication systems to increase the efficiency of the channel.
Sources
Codes for Mass Data Storage Systems, Second fully revised edition, Shannon Foundation Publishers, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, Nov. 2004.
ISBN90-74249-27-2[1]
The Compact Disc Story, AES Journal, pp. 458–465, May 1998
[2].
The future of digital audio recording, AES Journal., pp. 171–172, 1999
[3].