It is well known that digital communications systems, based on separation between source and channel coding, are optimal from a theoretical perspective. However, the price to pay to achieve near-optimal performance is a very high encoding/decoding complexity and significant delays, since any capacity-approaching channel code requires long block lengths. Moreover, such digital schemes have to be specifically designed for the desired rate and distortion: if these change, the system has to be completely re-designed.
The aforementioned problems can be alleviated using discrete-time all-analog- processing communications systems that completely skip the digital domain, avoiding the use of a finite alphabet anywhere in the communications chain. The key idea is the use of non-linear mappings that act as analog codes, processing the samples proceeding from an analog source and producing continuous amplitude samples that are transmitted directly through the noisy channel. In addition to its theoretical interest, the relevance of this approach in practical systems is substantial. For instance, the proposed framework can be combined with compressed sensing and applied in imaging, resulting in excellent performance.

Javier Garcia-Frias received the Ingeniero de Telecomunicación degree from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain, in 1992, the Licenciado en Ciencias Matemáticas degree from UNED, Madrid, in 1995, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from UCLA, in 1999.

In 1992 and from 1994 to 1996 he was with Telefónica I+D in Madrid. From September 1999 to August 2008 he was an Assistant and then an Associate Professor  in the Department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering, where he is currently a Professor.

His research interests are in the area of information processing in communications and biological systems, with a focus on wireless communications, iterative decoding schemes for source and channel coding, coding for multiterminal sources, joint source-channel coding, and cellular regulatory networks.

Javier Garcia-Frias is a recipient of a 2001 NSF CAREER award and of a 2001 Presidential Early Career Award (PECASE) in support of his communications program. He has been a member of the Signal Processing
for Communications Technical Committee (SPCOM-TC) in the IEEE Signal Processing Society (2004-2006), and has served as editor and guest editor of several journals, including IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (2007), IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (2003-2007), IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (2004-2006), and EURASIP Journal on Bioinformatics and Systems Biology (2005-present).