Someone You Should Know

Posted on April 4, 2016 in ATSC News

Mark Earnshaw, Coherent Logix

Mark Earnshaw is a senior systems architect at Coherent Logix which was hired by ONE Media to develop and test prototypes to demonstrate features and technologies of the ATSC 3.0 physical layer.  His work is focused on ensuring that the features going into the ATSC 3.0 Standard are ones that fall inline with the needs of broadcasters.

“The initial deployment of ATSC 3.0 will focus on upgrading the services we currently get from the ATSC 1.0 Standard – higher quality video and audio,” said Dr. Earnshaw.  “It will create greater capacity within transmission channels.”

Mark lives with his wife, Mei, and daughter, Julie, in Ottawa, Canada and enjoys taking family vacations including a recent two-and-a-half week trip to Beijing.

Earnshaw joined Coherent Logix nearly two years ago as part of a wireless team from BlackBerry that worked on LTE, including the physical layer.  The organization eventually moved into support of the ATSC Standard and has supported the proposal and design of certain key features including the bootstrap which acts as the physical layer entry point into the system. Earnshaw, personally, was heavily involved in designing and specifying the physical layer framing.

“ATSC 3.0 is being designed to be flexible enough to handle current and future wireless services, downloads, and interacting with cellular radio.  It’s also exciting because there are probably other features and future service offerings that we can’t even think about or envision right now, but which the currently-designed physical layer will support by providing a flexible toolbox of technologies,” he said.

Dr. Earnshaw is part of the S32 Specialist Group on the Physical Layer and the TG3-7 subgroup which is focused on extensibility (to ensure each document in the Standard is sufficiently well-designed to be extendable in the future).

During his time working with Nortel and BlackBerry, Earnshaw was immersed in transmission systems for 3G and 4G cellular. He is applying the knowledge gained during that experience to ATSC 3.0 over-the-air TV broadcasting.

“It has really given me the opportunity to work with a number of ATSC people around the world and to build relationships based on mutual respect.  At the same time as I am trying to share my expertise, I am also learning new things from these people,” he said.  “The broadcast environment was new to me before two years ago and I have constantly been learning along the way.”

Posted in ATSC News