Alberto Sangiovanni Vincentelli (Milan, Italy, 1947), professor at the University of California at Berkeley (United States), today received the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge award in the Information and Communication Technologies category, for his contribution to design and to the improvement of the chips, which are present in today's electronic devices.
In this fifteenth edition, the jury considered that his work over fifty years "radically transformed" the construction of electronic circuits, going from a traditional process to the automated industry known today.
"By providing software tools to facilitate the creation of complex chips, he enabled a worldwide explosion of integrated circuit design, spanning research, industry, and academia," the jury's minutes read.
Sangiovanni Vincentelli details that the processing capacity of electronic circuits evolved over the years "from one to a million".
This great transformation promoted the development and commercialization of the chips on which the operation of the devices that are present in daily use are based, such as computers and mobile phones, the microprocessors installed in cars, airplanes, household appliances, and toys.
Qualified by the jury as a "prolific inventor" and an "extraordinary mentor", Sangiovanni Vincentelli also founded the companies Cadence and Synopsis, which are today a reference in the global electronics industry for developing the software programs used for the design of "all and each” of the electronic chips produced on the planet.
His candidacy for this Award received 28 nominations, both institutional and individual, including Barry Barish, Nobel Prize in Physics (2017), and Joseph Sifakis, Turing Award (2007).
Ronald Ho, Meta's senior director of Silicon Engineering and jury secretary, explains that, during the early years of the computer industry, "silicon chips were relatively simple" and could be "designed by hand."
However, a smartphone, for example, contains microprocessors with billions of transistors inside.
“How was it possible for us to go from making chips by hand, with a few thousand transistors, to today's complex chips?
The answer is that we achieved it thanks to the work of the laureate”, Ho qualifies.
In the 2022 edition, the American engineer Judea Pearl was awarded in this same category for providing a new method to understand how the most complex artificial intelligence systems work.
Known in his discipline, Pearl created a mathematical model that allows computers to manage uncertainty and make decisions in a similar way to what we humans do: through probability and causality.
The jury in this category has been led by Joos Vandewalle, honorary president of the Royal Flemish Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium and emeritus professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Catholic University of Leuvenay.
The members were Regina Barzilay, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Health at the School of Engineering of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (United States);
Georg Gottlob, Professor of Computer Science at the Universities of Oxford (United Kingdom) and the Vienna Technological University (Austria);
Oussama Khatib, Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Robotics Laboratory at Stanford University (United States);
Rudolf Kruse, Professor at the Faculty of Computer Science at the Otto von Guericke University of Magdeburg (Germany);
and Mario Piattini,
The BBVA Foundation has counted on these awards since 2008 to recognize high-impact contributions and they have the collaboration of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) to compose the technical committees and juries.
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