Data Transport and Processing in a Digital Cinema Theatre System

Mark Winchell is a product manager at Qualcomm, with responsibility for theater system equipment, a position he has held for five years, working on several programs. Prior to joining the company, he worked for Rockwell International as a product engineer and was on the technical staff at the MITRE Corp. Winchell holds engineering B.S. degrees from both Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and SUNY Buffalo.

G. Kent Walker is a vice-president of technology at Qualcomm Inc. His current role is Project Engineer for Digital Cinema. Prior to Qualcomm he worked at General Instrument, M/A-COM Linkabit, Scientific Atlanta, and Harris Corporation. Products developed under his technical leadership include analog and digital video satellite receivers, digital microwave radios, audio signal processors, digital satellite modems, and video scrambling and access control equipment. He has 20 granted and pending patents in the areas of digital communications, digital audio, and image transmission. Walker earned BEE and MSEE degrees at Georgia Institute of Technology. He is a member of SMPTE, AES, and IEEE.

John Ratzel is senior vice-president, engineering, for Qualcomm's Digital Media Division, where he leads a diverse technical team of hardware, software, and systems engineers implementing a variety of wireless multimedia communications systems and devices. For the past four years, he has had technical oversight for the development and deployment of the company's digital cinema technology. Ratzel received B.S., M.S., E.E., and Ph.D. degrees from MIT, where his various research and thesis activities were in the areas of circuit and system design, and signal (image) processing.