John O'Sullivan (engineer)


John O'Sullivan is an Australian engineer.

Fourier transforms and WiFi

In 1977, John O'Sullivan, while working at the Dwingeloo Radio Observatory in the Netherlands, co-authored a paper in the Journal of the Optical Society of America titled "Image sharpness, Fourier optics, and redundant-spacing interferometry" with J. P. Hamaker, and J. E. Noordam. In this paper, they presented a technique for sharpening and improving picture clarity in radio astronomy images.
In the early 1990s, O'Sullivan led a team at the CSIRO which patented, in 1996, the use of a related technique for reducing multipath interference of radio signals transmitted for computer networking. This technology is a part of all recent WiFi implementations. As of April 2012, the CSIRO has earned over $430 million in royalties and settlements arising from the use of this patent as part of the 802.11 standards with as much as a billion dollars expected after further lawsuits against other parties.
O'Sullivan joined Morse Micro in 2019. The Sydney-based company is developing a Wi-Fi microprocessor, now known as Wi-Fi HaLow.

Qualification

Career

Research highlights

  • Achieved an eight-fold increase of the bandwidth processing capacity of the Westerbork Radio Telescope as project leader for the digital continuum backend receiver
  • Participated in a series of innovative experiments to detect exploding black holes and other short time astronomical events
  • Developed an intellectual underpinning for adaptive optics in light telescopes and redundant baseline interferometer in radio telescopes
  • With Austek Microsystems created a fast Fourier transform computer chip. This VLSI chip consisted of 160,000 transistors and performed real time transforms at rates up to 2.5 Msamples/s
  • Influential role in the system design for the Australia Telescope
  • Led a CSIRO team comprising Graham Daniels, John Deane, Diethelm Ostry, Terry Percival who together invented a patented technology that uses fast Fourier transform and other techniques to enable fast, robust wireless networking in the home and office
  • Led the system design for the world's first 802.11a chipset developed by Radiata Networks
  • Over 40 scientific and technical papers at numerous industry conferences
  • Granted 12 patents in the area of special purpose FFT processors, Wireless LANs and antennas
  • Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and Institute of Engineers Australia
  • Member of international review committee for information and communications technologies in CSIRO
  • Member of Australian Square Kilometre Array Consultative Committee
  • Chair of the Mathematics, Information and Communication Sciences Expert Advisory Committee, Convenor ICT Appraisal committee, 2004 CRC selection round
  • Optical Society of America
  • Board Director AAPT, Taggle Systems