His patented invention, a "Speech Coding Method for Reducing the Bit Rate Needed for Transmission of High-Quality Speech on Digital Networks," enabled digital speech coding, a key building block of digital communication. It not only allowed digital speech that is of much higher quality, it dramatically expanded the benefits of cellular phone technology to millions of users.

Simply described, Atal’s invention reduced the bandwidth required to send high-quality speech signals on narrow-band channels. By reducing the size of the bandwidth, Atal’s invention effectively expanded by many times the carrying capacity of the limited area of the electromagnetic spectrum used by the growing number of cellular users. Without his invention, many millions of users would be denied the benefits of using cellular technologies because the bandwidth would not have the capacity to handle them.

The impact of Atal’s invention in permitting widespread use of quality digital systems has been obvious for U.S. residents over the last two years as the systems have become widely used. But the impact of digital cellular technology on emerging nations has been far greater. Since they lack the wired fiber optic infrastructure of the U.S. and other developed nations, mobile digital cellular communications, which is essentially wireless, has been the answer to quickly joining the Information Age.. Digital cellular systems are rapidly becoming the information highway in countries like China and Brazil.

Atal was ahead of his time when he developed his ideas in the early 1980’s, since semiconductor technologies of sufficient processing power simply were not available to implement his ideas. By the late 1980’s, the technology caught up and Atal’s patented technology began to be widely accepted as an elegant solution that was fundamental to digital cellular technology. Eventually, his ideas gained universal support and were adopted by a number of standards bodies. They had become essential to implement high-quality digital cellular systems.

Atal, who is engaged in research in speech coding and automatic speech recognition at AT&T Labs in Florham Park, joined the company in January, 1997. He had previously been Head of the Acoustics and Audio Communication, Research Department at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill. He was made a Bell Laboratories Fellow in 1994 and an AT&T Fellow in 1997.

Born in India, Atal received his BS degree in Physics from the University of Lucknow, India, in 1952 ; a Diploma in Electrical Communication Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, in 1955, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, New York City in 1968. From 1957 to 1960, he was a lecturer in Acoustics at the Department of Electrical Communication Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.