Abbas Ahmed Amin El Gamal (born May 30, 1950), or simply Abbas El Gamal is an

Egyptian-American Egyptian Americans () are Americans of partial or full Egyptian ancestry. The 2016 US Census estimated the number of people with Egyptian ancestry at 256,000, most of whom are from Egypt's Christian Orthodox Coptic minority. Egyptian Americans m ...

electrical engineer Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

, educator and entrepreneur. He is best known for his contributions to network

information theory Information theory is the mathematical study of the quantification (science), quantification, Data storage, storage, and telecommunications, communication of information. The field was established and formalized by Claude Shannon in the 1940s, ...

field-programmable gate arrays A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is a type of configurable integrated circuit that can be repeatedly programmed after manufacturing. FPGAs are a subset of logic devices referred to as programmable logic devices (PLDs). They consist of ...

(FPGAs), and CMOS imaging sensors and systems. He is the

Hitachi () is a Japanese Multinational corporation, multinational Conglomerate (company), conglomerate founded in 1910 and headquartered in Chiyoda, Tokyo. The company is active in various industries, including digital systems, power and renewable ener ...

America Professor of Engineering at

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

. He has founded, co-founded and served on the board of directors and technical advisory boards of several semiconductor, EDA, and biotechnology startup companies.

Biography

Education

El Gamal was born in

Cairo, Egypt Cairo ( ; , ) is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Egypt and the Cairo Governorate, being home to more than 10 million people. It is also part of the List of urban agglomerations in Africa, largest urban agglomeration in Africa, L ...

and received his B.Sc. Honors degree from

Cairo University Cairo University () is Egypt's premier public university. Its main campus is in Giza, immediately across the Nile from Cairo. It was founded on 21 December 1908;"Brief history and development of Cairo University." Cairo University Faculty of En ...

in 1972. From Stanford, he earned an M.S. in electrical engineering in 1975, an M.S. in statistics in 1977 and his Ph.D. in 1978.

Academic career

El Gamal was an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering from 1978 to 1980. He has been on the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering since 1981. He was director of the Information Systems Laboratory from 2004 to 2009. From 2012 to 2017 he was chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. In his primary field, network information theory, El Gamal studies the absolute performance limits of communication and computing networks and develops algorithms and protocols to achieve these limits. He published highly cited papers on several classical problems in the field and co-authored its first textbook, ''Network Information Theory''. Likewise, he was a pioneer in the development of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA)—a type of integrated circuit that can be electrically reconfigured to implement differing functions. He holds key patents and wrote several highly cited papers on basic architecture and design of FPGAs and pioneered the use of FPGAs in teaching digital system design. El Gamal was also a key figure in the development of CMOS image sensors, the technology widely used today in cell phone and digital cameras. He started the industrially funded Programmable Digital Camera project, which helped spur several key innovations in the field and funded several PhD students who became leaders in the image sensor industry and research. He also developed an award-winning course on the topic.

Business

In 1984, El Gamal joined LSI as director of its newly formed Systems Research Laboratory, which evolved into the company's very successful Consumer Product Division. In 1986, he cofounded

Actel Actel Corporation was an American manufacturer of nonvolatile, low-power field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), mixed-signal FPGAs, and programmable logic solutions. It had its headquarters in Mountain View, California, with offices worldwide. I ...

– only the second FPGA company in the world – where he made several key inventions in FPGA architecture and held multiple posts, including that of chief scientist until 1990. Actel was acquired by

Microsemi Microsemi Corporation was an Aliso Viejo, California-based provider of semiconductor and system solutions for aerospace & defense, communications, data center and industrial markets. In February 2018, it was announced that Chandler, Arizona-ba ...

in 2010. In 1990, he founded Silicon Architects – one of the first silicon IP companies in the world – holding multiple posts, including that of chief technical officer until its acquisition by Synopsys in 1995, where he was a vice president until 1997. In 1998, El Gamal co-founded Pixim, Inc., a fabless semiconductor company that developed chipsets for security cameras based on the Digital Pixel Sensor technology developed by his group at Stanford. Sony Electronics acquired Pixim in 2012. In 2011, El Gamal co-founded Inscopix, a neurotech company developing tools to enable monitoring of brain activity in vivo. He serves on its board of directors.

Awards and honors

* 2016 IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal * 2014 Viterbi Lecture, University of Southern California * 2013 Shannon Memorial Lecture, UCSD * 2013 Member of the National Academy of Engineering * 2012 Claude E. Shannon Award, IEEE Information Theory Society * 2000 Fellow, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Bibliography

Books

''Network Information Theory'', (Cambridge University Press, 2011) – with Young-Han Kim

Journals

2011: "Miniaturized integration of a fluorescence microscope," ''Nature Methods'' – with K. Ghosh, L. Burns, E. Cocker, A. Nimmerjahn, Y. Ziv, M. Schnitzer 2006: "Throughput-Delay Trade-offs in Wireless Networks," in two parts, ''IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory'' – with J. Mammen, B. Prabhakar, and D. Shah 2002: "Energy-efficient Packet Transmission over a Wireless Link," ''IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking'' –with E. Uysal-Biyikoglu and B. Prabhakar 2001: "A 10,000 Frames/s CMOS Digital Pixel Sensor," ''IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits'' – with S. Kleinfelder, S. Lim, X. Liu 1982: Achievable rates for multiple descriptions – with T. Cover 1979: Capacity theorems for the relay channel – with T. Cover

References

External links

Abbas El Gamal Profile at Stanford University
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gamal, Abbas El 1950 births American people of Egyptian descent American electrical engineers American information theorists American businesspeople Living people Cairo University alumni Stanford University alumni Stanford University Department of Electrical Engineering faculty Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Fellows of the IEEE People from Cairo