William E. Stephens

Dr. Stephens returned to Telcordia in 1999 as a Senior Scientist in Exploratory Wireless Research after five years at Sarnoff Corporation working in Wireless and Network Applications for commercial and government applications.

Dr. Stephens was previously at Telcordia from 1986 to 1994 as Director, High-Speed Switching and Storage Technology Research where he was responsible for a group performing research, standards and test evaluation on SONET/ATM equipment and networks for telephony.

He was responsible for the Telcordia contributions to the physical layer technical subcommittee at the ATM Forum. In this capacity, Dr. Stephens edited the 155 Mbps over Twisted Pair Copper Cable interoperability recommendations. He also did conformance testing of vendor frame relay equipment against ANSI and Frame Relay Forum standards and assisted Bell Operating Companies in picking products for data communication networks.

He directed a 10 person effort to prototype experimental 2.5 Gb/s and 622 Mb/s SONET conformance testers so that Telcordia can verify if vendor SONET equipment offerings meet the ANSI SONET specifications. He also directed a 20-person effort to study if large-scale (10,000 to 100,000 lines) broadband integrated services digital network (B-ISDN) central office switches are feasible in the 5 to 10 year timeframe.

His group successfully demonstrated the first practical all-digital High Definition Television fiber optic transmission system using the emerging SONET telecommunications standard at 622 Mb/s over 42 km of single mode optical fiber. The group also successfully demonstrated a practical optical amplifier package for semiconductor optical amplifiers used micro-optic techniques with the coupling tolerances reduced by an order of magnitude and over 10 dB gain.

Dr. Stephens published over 50 articles, has 1 patent and filed for 4 additional patents in the field of telecommunications and signal processing.

He is the Technical Program Chair for the Engineers Conference at Networld+Interop (1996-2000), and has served on several technical program committees, including IEEE GLOBECOM, MILCOM and the IEEE Electronic Components and Technical Conference. He has served as a guest editor for two issues of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC) . He is a senior member of the IEEE, and member of Sigma Xi, Tau Beta Pi and Eta Kappa Nu.

EDUCATION

• 5 week course on Computer Science for Experienced Researchers at Carnegie Mellon, 1991-1992.
• Ph. D., University of Southern California, 1981.
• MSEE, University of Southern California, 1980.
• BSEE, cum laude, University of Southern California, 1977.