Nvidia’s Jensen Huang to get semiconductor industry’s highest honor

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will acquire the chip industry’s highest honor, the Robert N. Noyce Award.

Huang will acquire the honor from his peers at the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) annual awards dinner on November 18. The award is named just after Intel cofounder Robert Noyce, who is credited with many pioneering achievements at the dawn of the chip market. He was nicknamed the “mayor of Silicon Valley” and identified for aphorisms like, “Don’t be encumbered by the past. Go out and do something wonderful.” Noyce passed away in 1990.

The award recognizes a leader who has made outstanding contributions to the semiconductor market in technologies or public policy.

SIA president and CEO John Neuffer mentioned in a statement that Huang’s extraordinary vision and tireless execution have tremendously strengthened the chip market, revolutionized computing, and sophisticated artificial intelligence. He mentioned Huang’s accomplishments have fueled numerous innovations — from gaming to scientific computing to self-driving vehicles — and he continues to advance technologies that will transform the market and the world.

Huang founded Nvidia in 1993 and has served as CEO considering that its inception. Starting out in 3D graphics, Huang showed me a demo of the company’s graphics chip and its “Windows accelerator” application. That was when I was at the San Jose Mercury News in 1995, and it was Huang’s initially interview with the press.

Nvidia went on to assist develop the 3D gaming industry into the world’s biggest entertainment market. More lately, Nvidia utilized the parallel processing it utilized for its graphics processing units (GPUs) to do non-graphics compute tasks. That turned into a enormous application in AI, exactly where Nvidia’s chips are becoming the brains of computer systems, robots, and self-driving vehicles.

In the more than 25 years considering that the company’s initially chip, scene complexity in computer system graphics has enhanced about 500 million occasions, Huang mentioned. Moore’s Law, which predicts chip functionality will double each couple of years, would have enhanced only one hundred,000 occasions in the very same period if unaided by improved chip design and style.

That relentless innovation has paid off. Nvidia is now worth $490 billion on the stock industry and employs 20,000 individuals.

On to the metaverse

Huang is also a fan of the intersection among science fiction and technologies and has lately been speaking more about the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One.

Huang is a recipient of the IEEE Founder’s Medal, the Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award, and honorary doctorate degrees from Taiwan’s National Chiao Tung University, National Taiwan University, and Oregon State University. In 2019, Harvard Business Review ranked him No. 1 on its list of the world’s one hundred ideal-performing CEOs more than the lifetime of their tenure. In 2017, he was named Fortune‘s Businessperson of the Year.

Prior to founding Nvidia, Huang worked at LSI Logic and Advanced Micro Devices. He holds a BSEE degree from Oregon State University and an MSEE degree from Stanford University.

Last year, the Noyce award went to Lisa Su, CEO of rival Advanced Micro Devices. She described to me when that Huang is truly a distant relative of hers.

“I am honored to receive the 2021 Noyce Award and do so on behalf of my colleagues at Nvidia, whose body of work this award recognizes,” Huang mentioned. “It has been the greatest joy and privilege to have grown up with the semiconductor and computer industries, two that so profoundly impact the world. As we enter the era of AI, robotics, digital biology, and the metaverse, we will see super-exponential technology advances. There’s never been a more exciting or important time to be in the semiconductor and computer industries.”

He lately received a distinguished lifetime achievement award by the Asian American Engineer of the Year from the Chinese Institute of Engineers (CIE) group. Huang pointed out he was “destined to be an engineer,” as his father was an engineer in Taiwan. His brothers have been engineers, and his wife, Lori, whom he met as a sophomore at Oregon State University, is also an engineer.

In his acceptance speech for the CIE award, Huang made a uncommon comment beyond Nvidia’s business enterprise matters, noting the scourge of the current anti-Asian violence: “Racism is one flywheel we must stop.”

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz