On Thursday, February 13, 1997, Gottfried Ungerboeck was awarded the 1997 Australia Prize in Telecommunications. The Australia Prize is an international award given by the Government of Australia for an outstanding specific achievement in a selected area of science and technology promoting human welfare. The prize is $A300,000 together with an inscribed medal. In 1997 the Australia Prize was awarded in the area of Telecommunications to three recipients. The award announcement of the three 1997 Australia Prize winners was made on Tuesday 11 February by the Prime Minister of Australia.
Dr. Ungerboeck was recognized for his work in trellis-coded modulation. "Gottfried Ungerboeck's system, originally invented for coding data for transmission between computer modems, has had a major impact on world telecommunications. The coding system he developed in the late 1970s is now used in most systems for modern information transmission, including telephone modems, in satellite and terrestrial wireless systems, for digital audio and TV broadcasting, in digital subscriber loops designed for gaining access to the internet and other services via conventional telephone copper wires at megabit-per-second rates. The system, called trellis-coded-modulation (TCM), enables reliable data transmission over telephone lines and other transmission media at far higher speeds than was ever thought possible. Within years of its emergence, TCM became an industry standard. In 1984 it was recommended by the International Telecommunications Union for use in high-speed telephone modems.