In the past 20 years there has been an explosion in the application of acoustic noise cancellation (ANC) to combat environmental noise. ANC is now found in a wide range of consumer products ranging from headphones to automobiles. This talk will cover the basics of ANC, with examples from several industries, and discuss some of the fundamental limitations which presently limit the achievable performance.
Bob Adams graduated from Tufts University in 1976, and after spending several years as a musician, he began a career in the consumer/professional audio equipment market. In the late 1970’s he published the first paper on log-domain filtering, and then began working extensively in the brand-new area of sigma-delta A/D converters, producing the first audio converter with more than 16-bit resolution. In 1989 Bob joined the Analog Devices converter group, and worked on ADI’s early sigma-delta converter products. In the last 25 years he has pioneered many important architectural advances in sigma-delta converters including mismatch-shaping, multi-bit quantization, and continuous-time architectures. Bob also has a passion for digital signal processing, and produced the first integrated asynchronous sample-rate converter chip. After getting a taste of digital design, Bob founded the sigmaDSP line of audio-specific DSP cores. Bob has 38 patents (32 with ADI) , and is a Fellow of the IEEE, Fellow of the Audio Engineering Society as well as a Fellow of ADI. He received the Pederson award in Solid-State Circuits in 2015 and the Industrial Pioneer award from the Circuits-and-Systems society in 2016. He has published and taught extensively in his areas of expertise.