PHOTOGRAPHS: BRUCE OSBORN/OZONE INC.; PHOTO ENHANCEMENT: Q STUDIOS INC.

The 2004 IEEE Medal of Honor winner, former NEC Corp. chairman Tadahiro Sekimoto, has had a career that for sheer drama and accomplishment has few counterparts in industrial history. As a researcher and research manager in the 1950s and 1960s, he pioneered the use of time-division multiple access and other digital technologies that revolutionized satellite communications, as well as digital compression techniques that evolved into today's digital video.

After rocketing through the NEC management ranks in the 1970s, he became president in 1980 and chairman in 1994, overseeing the company in an era when revenues swelled from US $4.7 billion to $40.3 billion by 1998. Along the way, the Queen of the United Kingdom made him an Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and France inducted him into L'Ordre National de la Légion d'Honneur.

Then, to quell a crisis that threatened the company in 1998, he gave up his position as chairman, showing he was as bold an executive as he was a technical innovator.

IT'S BEEN A LONG, EXHILARATING TRIP from the local restaurant Sekimoto's parents operated in Kobe, Japan, to the spacious Tokyo office he now inhabits as chairman of the Institute for International Socio-Economic Studies, a technology-oriented think tank. Kobe, a picturesque city in western Japan, is known for its beef and sake, not its engineers. But as a middle school student, Sekimoto got better grades in science than in any other subject, so he entered college bent on studying physics and winning a Nobel Prize.

One of his housemates, however, was Kazuhiko Nishijima, who would become one of the great theoretical physicists of his generation. “Whenever we had homework, Nishijima would just come up instantly with a solution, while I had a hard time,” Sekimoto says. “I would sweat over the work for hours before I came up with a solution. I realized that people are born with different aptitudes.”

“Meeting him made me discover that I did not have an aptitude for theoretical physics, so I had to think about what else I could do,” he recalls. “Had I not met him, I would probably have gone on to become a professor or a scholar, but in that case my career would have advanced at the speed of a tortoise.”

Sekimoto changed his major from theoretical to experimental physics and, after getting his bachelor's degree in 1948, went straight to NEC's research laboratories in Tokyo. His first assignment was to design a new telephone set. For a while, he toiled away at small assignments, a young peasant in the feudalistic, seniority-based Japanese corporate research establishment. “Whatever my boss ordered me to do, I would say, ‘Yes, sir.'”

One early project was the joint development with Kyoto University of a voice-activated typewriter. Though Sekimoto was directly involved with this effort only for a short time, the project continues to date. And it foreshadowed his later advocacy of voice-recognition technology while at NEC.

The turning point of his career was a pulse code modulation (PCM) research project contracted from the Self-Defense Forces of Japan in 1957. PCM is now a standard means of converting analog signals, especially audio, into digital information. The magnitude of the analog signal is sampled frequently, typically thousands of times a second, and the resulting samples are translated into binary digits—digitized, in other words. Sekimoto's basic interest was, first of all, whether PCM technology could sustain a viable quality of communications, and second, how changes in the bit rate affected the quality of the transmitted and received signals.