Mr. Kazuo Hagimoto graduated from School of Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering in 1978 and 1980, respectively. In 1980, he joined Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation, which was reorganized to Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) later. From 2005 to 2009, he served as Director of Network Innovation Laboratories at NTT. From 2009, he led its umbrella organization within the company Science and Core Technology Laboratory Group as Director until he was appointed as President of NTT Electronics Corporation (NEL) in 2013. Since 2019, he has been serving as Advisor at NEL.After starting his career at NTT around the time when fiber optics was still at the dawn, he continuously drove research and development of optical fiber transmission systems, pioneering novel technologies as well as realizing their commercial uses. His work pushed transmission capacity of an optical fiber from mere gigabit per second to terabit per second, which are commonly seen in today’s social infrastructure.
As a remarkable achievement, in 1989, he developed long-distance optical repeater system using Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplifier (EDFA) and demonstrated the world's first, gigabit-per-second long-distance optical transmission. In the same year, he also succeeded in showing transmission capacity could be increased from 1 Gbit/s to 10 Gbit/s by introducing such functional components as external modulators and dispersion-compensating fibers in an experimental demonstration, which was also recognized as the world’s first. In 1996, this work was finally put to practical use in a 10 Gbit/s terrestrial optical amplification repeater system, the first in the world. Besides leading technological development, he made important contributions in making international standardizations about reference frequency (193.1 THz) used in optical communication systems and the 10 Gbit/s digital frame multiplexing hierarchy. With his additional efforts in confirming system reliability and developing measurement technologies needed, these works resulted in global introduction of optical amplification repeater systems. He also established the world's first, low-noise distributed Raman/EDFA hybrid optical amplification repeater technology, which were required for safe operation of optical transmission systems using high output excitation power in a commercial environment, putting it into practical use in 2003. His work extended in 2007 to commercializing large-capacity optical transmission systems enabled by wavelength division multiplexing technology with 40 Gbit/s per wavelength, paving the way to the terabit-per-second capacity era. With a strong demand for full-scale terabit-per-second transmission based on 100 Gbit/s per wavelength that would support fast growing digital technologies, he broke the shell of conventional R&D methods and organized a community-based, industry-government-academia collaboration scheme that extended to the world, enabling Japan to hold the lead in global cooperation as well as competition in the field of optical transmission technologies.
With his excellent insight and leadership, he has led a number of projects and schemes, such as global carrier collaboration and industry-government-academia collaboration with the purpose of developing even higher-capacity optical communication systems, and also played a leading role for many years in the international standardization of Optical Transmission Networks (OTN). These activities have played a key role in supporting long-distance backbone networks not only in Japan, including NTT, but also in other countries. He has thus been instrumental in strengthening Japan's international competitiveness in this field and fostering global cooperation toward the next generation technologies. He also demonstrated his leadership at IEICE by serving as Chair of Technical Committee on Optical Communication Systems from 2001 to 2002, Director of General Affairs from 2006 to 2007, and President of the Communications Society in 2011.
For his achievements, he has received following awards: the Sakurai Memorial Prize from the Optoelectronic Industry and Technology Development Association in 1989; the Oliver Lodge premium from the IEE in 1991; the Kenjiro Takayanagi memorial award in 1994; Maejima Award from TEISHIN association Japan in 2007; the Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Prizes for Science and Technology in 2009; the 7th Industry-Academia- Government Collaboration Honor Program Prime Minister Award in 2009; and Medal with Purple Ribbon from Japanese Emperor in 2016. At IEICE, he has also been awarded the Distinguished Achievement and Contributions Award in 2013, along with two Achievement Awards in 1994 and 2006 and the 2005 Fellow title as well as IEEE Fellow grade in 2008.
As mentioned above, his contribution to the development of the field of electronic information communication is extremely remarkable. We highly recommend him as an Honorary Member of the IEICE.
