Not many academics leave the university environment to build a very successful startup, only to return to academia to give general-purpose algorithms back to the research community. John Cioffi is one of them.

Cioffi was one of the originators of asymmetric digital subscriber line technology when he left Stanford University in 1991 to found Amati Communications Inc., taking many budding researchers—such as Krista Jacobsen and Peter Chow—with him. Cioffi struck it lucky when Texas Instruments Inc. acquired Amati in 1997 for $395 million, but TI gained something lasting too, as Chow and Jacobsen stuck around to manage its DSL business.

Cioffi, however, elected to return to Stanford, emerging at industry conferences three years ago to disclose his dynamic spectrum management (DSM) concepts for better control of multiple service types over DSL. Cioffi and a new crop of Stanford graduate students volunteered to help semiconductor companies and OEMs looking to implement DSM, and the first generation of such chips is hitting the market now.

Cioffi remains interested in private companies, though this time from a services perspective. His Adaptive Spectrum and Signal Alignment Inc. started life as a small consultancy and remains focused on parameter analysis of DSL lines. Cioffi is staying loosely linked to Stanford this time around, betting on academia as a good place to grow.