Nationality American Died 2008 | Role Engineer Name John Costas Doctoral advisor Norbert Wiener | |
Alma mater Purdue BS 1944, M.E.E. 1947
MIT PhD 1951 Known for Costas loops
Costas arrays Education Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue University Fields Electrical engineering, Radar | ||
Residence United States of America | ||
John Peter Costas (1923 in Wabash, Indiana – 2008) was an American electrical engineer. Costas invented, among other things, the Costas loop and Costas arrays.
Contents
Biography
Costas studied at Purdue University as an undergraduate. During World War II, he was involved in radar engineering, serving in the U.S. Navy as a radar officer. He was a graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he worked on interference filtering and linear systems coding. While there, he worked with Norbert Wiener, R. M. Fano, J. B. Wiesner and Y. W. Lee. He worked for General Electric from 1951 until the early 1980s, and for Cogent Systems, Inc. He was retired since then, and died on August 9, 2008.
Work
Costas is probably best known for his 1950s invention of the Costas loop, a modified phase locked loop that recovers the "suppressed" carrier in many digital communications receivers. It had "a profound effect on modern digital communications" In the 1960s, he helped solve the mystery concerning poor performance of sonar systems. He found that the rapidly time-varying channel made coherent processing inappropriate. His solution involved a kind of permutation array, now known as a Costas array, which has ideal properties for the problem.
Costas was made a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1965 for "contributions to communications theory and techniques."
Publications
Among Costas' most notable publications are the following,