Synopsys founder Aart de Geus to receive chip industry’s highest honor

The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) announced Aart de Geus, Synopsys executive chair and founder, will be the 2024 recipient of SIA’s highest honor, the Robert N. Noyce Award.

The chip industry’s trade group gives the Noyce Award, named after Intel’s founding CEO Robert N. Noyce, annually in recognition of a leader who has made outstanding contributions to the semiconductor industry in technology or public policy.

The ceremony for de Geus will take place at the SIA Awards Dinner on November 21, 2024, in San Jose, California.

“A universally respected leader and visionary in the semiconductor industry, Aart pioneered groundbreaking electronic design automation (EDA) technology, which provides the software tools central to designing chips,” said John Neuffer, SIA president and CEO, in a statement. “During a careerspanning over four decades, Aart has made immeasurable contributions to our industry and hasserved as a powerful and influential advocate for our priorities. We are thrilled to recognize himwith the 2024 Robert N. Noyce Award for his landmark achievements.”

Synopsys is now much more valuable than when de Geus started the company in the 1980s. Earlier this year, Synopsys announced it would acquire Ansys for $35 billion.

De Geus started his career at General Electric in 1982, where he developed foundational tools for design and verification in semiconductors. Synopsys, which Aart founded in 1986, initially developed and broadly commercialized logic synthesis, which automates the creation of digital designs from language descriptions.

This capability transitioned the computer-aided Design (CAD) into the electronic design automation (EDA) era by enabling and automating decades of enormous, digital complexity scaling, often referred to as Moore’s Law. Under the law, named after former Intel leader Gordon Moore, chips doubled the number of components every couple of years. It created a relentless metronome for progress for decades, as chips are the foundation of everything electronic.

De Geus served as the company’s CEO from 1994 to 2024. In recognition of his pioneering work, industry impact, and community service, de Geus has received numerous honors, including Electronic Business Magazine’s “CEO of the Year” (2002) and “Top 10 Most Influential Executives” (2005), the IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal (2007), the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG) “Spirit of the Valley” Lifetime Achievement Award (2007), the Electronic System Design Association (ESDA) Phil Kaufman Award (2008), the GSA “Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award” (2009), the Silicon Valley Engineering Council Hallof Fame Award (2013), and an honorary Ph.D. from Glasgow University (2022).

De Geus now serves as executive chair of Synopsys’ board of directors, where he continues tooversee the management of Synopsys business operations. He also serves on the board of directors of Applied Materials and is active in the business and local community. He serves on the boards of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG), the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA), and the Electronic System Design Alliance (ESDA).

De Geus is also a member of the US National Academy of Engineering. In 1999, he created the Synopsys Outreach Foundation, which promotes project-based science and math learning throughout Silicon Valley, in early recognition of the future shortage of engineering workforce in the high-tech industry. For over 35 years, Synopsys has also actively driven community engagements in its major worldwide locations.

De Geus received a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland and a Ph.D. from Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

“Receiving the 2024 Noyce Award is a great honor and I’m humbled to be among exceptional individuals recognized for lasting contributions to our uniquely exponential industry,” said de Geus, in a statement. “Looking back, the shift from CAD to EDA was truly a techonomic watershed that enabled a roughly 10-million-times increase in digital design productivity.”

De Geus added, “By fully embracing 3D multi-die integration, semi technology has now graduated from scale- to systemic-complexity! Propelled by the demand-economics of AI, and enabled by amazing, AI-powered design flows, we are fully launched into the next exponential era! It is so energizing to feel the multi-decade opportunity that is surrounding us and to be part of our industry’s collective ingenuity, that makes the impossible, possible… again and again!”

Past winners include Sanjay Mehrotra of Micron Technology (2023), Lip-Bu Tan of Cadence Design Systems (2022), Jensen Huang of Nvidia (2021), Lisa Su of AMD (2020) and many more going back to 1991.