Skip to main content Skip to secondary navigation
Main content start
Hitachi America Professor in the School of Engineering, Emeritus

John M. Cioffi

Hitachi America Professor in the School of Engineering, Emeritus
John M. Cioffi teaches Stanford's graduate electrical engineering course sequence in digital communications, part-time as recalled emeritus presently, from 1986 to the present. Cioffi's research interests are in the theory of transmitting the highest possible data rates on a number of different communications channels, many of which efforts spun out of Stanford through he and/or his many former PhD students to companies, most notably including the basic designed globally used 500 million DSL connections. Cioffi also oversaw the prototype developments for the worlds first cable modem and digital-audio broadcast systems. Cioffi pioneering the use of remote management algorithms to improve (over the internet or cloud) both wireline (DSL) and wireless (Wi-Fi) physical-layer transmission performance, an area often known as Dynamic Spectrum Management or Dynamic Line Management. Cioffi is co-inventor on basic patents for vectored DSL transmission and optimized MIMO wireless transmission. In his early career, Cioffi developed the worlds first full-duplex voiceband data modem while at Bell Laboratories, and the worlds first adaptively equalized disk read channel while at IBM. His courses and research projects over the years center on the area of multiuser transmission methods.

Education

PhD, Stanford, EE (1984)
MSEE, Stanford, EE (1979)
BSEE, University of Illinois, EE (1978)