Background
Hochmair was born in Vienna in 1940.
engineer entrepreneur university professor
Hochmair was born in Vienna in 1940.
He has been a professor at the Institute of Experimental Physics, University of Innsbruck since 1986. He has authored and co-authored over 100 technical articles and holds about 50 patents. He received his Diploma-Ing. and Doctorate.Tech. degrees in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Vienna in 1964 and 1967, respectively.
He joined the Institute for Physical Electronics of the Technical University of Vienna in 1965, where he taught courses on linear integrated circuits and circuit design.
He was a visiting associate professor at Stanford University in 1979. Cochlear implant design In 1975, the Austrian Research Council supported Hochmair"s cochlear implant project by a grant of 110,000 ATS, roughly equivalent to $11,000 United States dollar. A previous implant design by William F. House could only stimulate cochlea at one site.
They built a multichannel intra-cochlear electrode, and developed all the implantable and the external electronics for the transcutaneous transmission, the coding and decoding of circuits and the electrode driving circuitry while trying to minimize the power consumption. On December 16, 1977, the first micro-electronic multichannel device in the world was implanted.
They established MED-EL in 1989, a cochlear implant manufacture company.