Considered the highest honor in the field of Electrical Engineering the IEEE Medal of Honor was inaugurated in 1917 and  this year the the prize was increased to $2,000,000. If the name Henry Samueli isn't a familiar one, the company he co-founded in 2011, Broadcom, manufacturer of microprocessors, probably is. 

The IEEE announcement that Samueli is the first recipient of its $2 million monetary prize, states that is:

...in recognition of his pioneering research and advances in developing and commercializing analog and mixed signal communications systems circuits, which led to the explosive growth of broadband communication, wired and wireless networking technologies used today.

This IEEE video relates that Samueli, who is now 70, was the son of Polish immigrants who settled in California. He grew up in Los Angeles where, as a teenage he worked in his parent liquor store. His interest in technology was sparked in a junior high school by his success at building a "HeathKit" radio and he determined to become an electrical engineer. He earned Bachelor's, Master's and Doctorate Degrees at UCLA and went on to become a Professor there. 

It was at UCLA that Samueli began working on integrating high-performance analog circuits as well as digital circuits in a single chip but funding was consistently denied as the common wisdom of the time was that it would be impossible to put a radio frequency chip on the same substrate as a CMOS digital chip. It was only after Samueli co-founded Broadcom Corporation with one of his Ph.D. students, Henry Nicholas, that they got funding from DARPA and were able to make the breakthroughs which laid the foundation for delivering UltraHD, HDTV and high quality video streaming to the home and are recognised by this award.

As a prominent philanthropist, Samueli is also being honored for his significant support for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education details of which are also in the video.

At an event at which the award was made Kathleen Kramer, IEEE's CEO introduced Samueli, saying his "vision and technological innovations spurred the development of communications products used by nearly every person. In the ensuing fireside chat with Kramer as well as past IEEE CEO Ray Liu and IEEE COO Sophia Muirhead, Samueli voiced his opinion on the speed on change of today's technology

"Fasten your seat belts because the world is changing at a pace now that we have never seen before. When I finished my college career and was entering the engineering profession as a researcher in semiconductors and communications we had so-called Moore's Law … every two years, the capability of chips would double. At least it was predictable. Today, I don't know anybody who can say they know what artificial intelligence is going to bring us in five years, let alone one year or two years."

More Information

IEEE Medal of Honor

IEEE - Recipient Henry Samueli

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