Posted April 8, 2004

HP Fellow Norm Jouppi never doubted he would be an inventor.

As a fourth grader, Jouppi chose the field of electrical engineering. In sixth grade, he narrowed his focus to computer systems — despite the fact he had never actually used a computer or knew much about them. Within a year, he was fighting off middle school boredom with small inventions, such as embedding a transistor radio in the cover of his French textbook.

Three decades and more than 25 patents later, Jouppi's passion for invention hasn't wavered. The 20-year HP veteran has published more than 90 papers on computer architecture, CAD tools, Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) design, computer arithmetic, circuits, graphics and multimedia. Primarily a computer systems researcher, Jouppi has also published work in other areas of study including telepresence, audio engineering, and teleoperated robotics.

"For me, it would be boring to work at just one thing all my life with no variation," Jouppi says. "I think it's so much more fun to have a variety of foci."

Accomplished architect

His passion for science dates back to his days in graduate school at Stanford University. While working on his Ph.D. in electrical engineering, Jouppi was the principal designer and one of the chief architects of the famed Stanford MIPS processor project, working under accomplished Professor John Hennessey, who became president of the university in 2000.

"It was an exciting time because this project provided a foundation for many industry projects. We were truly on the leading edge of computer design," Jouppi recalls.

After making a name for himself on the MIPS project and completing his doctoral dissertation on CAD, Jouppi joined Digital Equipment Corp. in 1984, going to work at its Western Research Laboratory in Palo Alto.

There, Jouppi was the chief architect and lead designer of two other major microprocessor designs — the Multi-Titan and BIPS projects. In 1992, the BIPS processor reached the unheard of speed 300MHz — five times faster than Intel's Pentium processor.

In order to harness this processor speed while working with ordinary off-chip memories, Jouppi invented a set of techniques for improved computer memory systems. BIPS significantly improved the performance of its caches by augmenting them with prefetch buffers, which are now used on a wide variety of microprocessors, ranging from Intel's Pentium 4 to IBM Power systems. Two-level exclusive caching, first used in BIPS, is also used today in a number of microprocessors, including AMD's Athlon.

As a result of the world-record power dissipated by BIPS (115 Watts), Jouppi also became a key contributor to the development of heat pipe and thermosiphon-based cooling for microprocessors, which are still used today to cool the world's highest-performance microprocessors.

Jouppi has also remained active in the academic community. For 10 years he was a consulting professor at Stanford, where he taught classes on VLSI design, circuits and computer architecture.

Other interests

For five years, Jouppi also worked on Mutually Immersive Mobile Telepresence, or "BiReality," which is designed to allow users the experience of being in two places at once. To make it work, Jouppi's team created a teleoperated robotic device that carries sets of cameras and microphones that give users up to a 360-degree audio and video experience of the remote location.

Recently, Jouppi has been dividing his time between researching spatial audio conferencing and consulting on the adaptive enterprise.

Spatial audio conferencing recreates the directional sound field at a meeting location for remote attendees. One implementation uses a conference call device attached to a PC sound card through RCA stereo cables. Combined with human perceptual abilities — commonly known as the "cocktail party effect" — spatial audio can help remote attendees hear what is going on when more than one person is speaking at a time and enables speakers far from the device to be heard clearly.

"This technology can provide up to a 13-decibel increase in effective signal-to-noise ratio, giving a very significant increase in intelligibility," Jouppi says, adding that it can also be used for Internet chat, he adds.

"Instead of pounding away at the keyboard in a chat room, spatial audio enables everyone to use microphone headsets and talk just like they are all in one room," he says. "What's cool is that participants can move around the virtual room. You can even go up to a particular person and whisper in their ear for private conversations."

Jouppi believes this technology could become a popular alternative to text-based chat and could help drive HP server and multimedia PC sales.

Spatial audio conferencing will be demonstrated at the upcoming HP Tech Con 2004.