Tech pioneer who accelerated internet speeds receives prestigious IEEE Medal

In the early days of the consumer internet, most access was via a dial-up modem, a device hooked up to a phone line that transmitted requests for web pages via squeaks and squawks like someone yelling into the line.

Also: Microsoft's quantum chip Majarona 1 is a few qubits short

That primitive connectivity was dramatically altered by the advent of the digital broadband cable modem, a device that helped turn chip-maker Broadcom into a huge public company. 

Equivalent to a lifetime achievement award

On Thursday in New York, Henry Samueli, 70, was honored with the equivalent of a lifetime achievement award in computing for having developed those innovations and founding Broadcom in 1991 with partner Henry T. Nicholas III.

The $2 million prize was awarded by the IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a public charity founded in 1884 that is the largest professional society for engineers globally, with half a million members.

The IEEE's CEO, Kathleen Kramer, introduced Samueli, saying his "vision and technological innovations spurred the development of communications products used by nearly every person." (The formal award celebrates Samueli's "advances in developing and commercializing analog and mixed-signal communications systems circuits.") 

Also: OpenAI's o3 isn't AGI yet but it just did something no other AI has done

"Fasten your seat belts because the world is changing at a pace now that we have never seen before," said Samueli in a fireside chat with Kramer on Thursday, as well as past IEEE CEO Ray Liu and IEEE COO Sophia Muirhead. 

"When I finished my college career and was entering the engineering profession as a researcher in semiconductors and communications," recalled Samueli, "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."

The child of Polish immigrants

Samueli, the child of Polish immigrants who settled in California, was inspired to study electronics by his success at building a "HeathKit" radio in high school. 

Also: If you're not working on quantum-safe encryption now, it's already too late

At UCLA, where he received his bachelor's and master's degrees and was awarded a doctorate in electrical engineering, Samueli began working on how to make communications chips in a form far less complicated than was done at the time. 

"We had a team of faculty that were pursuing various ways you could integrate very high-performance analog circuits as well as your digital circuits all onto a single chip," recalled Samueli, which, at the time, was thought to be impossible.

"It was the common wisdom of the time that you cannot put a radio frequency chip on the same substrate as a CMOS digital chip. But we thought it could be done." 

Samueli and his collaborators sought grants to integrate different parts but were repeatedly rejected: "They all said, No way, it's impossible, go away, we're not interested." 

Finally, Samueli and co-founder Nicholas got funding from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). 

Also: Google's quantum breakthrough is 'truly remarkable' - but there's more to do

"DARPA loves disruptive technologies, super-high-risk, high-reward technology," he observed. With results that were ultimately "really significant", Broadcom was born.

"It pays to take high risk when you have high reward, and we certainly did," he said.

Samueli thinks AI is becoming invaluable

During the Q&A, asked about the future of communications, Samueli emphasized that optical transmissions will increasingly be moved closer to computer chips to make the relationship between compute and communications optimal.

"The closer you can bring that to the interface of the chip, the faster your systems will be. And that's what we're seeing a lot of these days in the AI networks. It's more and more optical communication." 

When it was my turn to ask a question for ZDNET, I asked Samueli how he sees the future for human engineers as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly part of chip design. 

"AI is becoming an invaluable asset for designers to build their systems because they can offload the more mundane tasks of generating code for certain applications," said Samueli. 

"I still think, at least as of today, we need the creativity of the high-level thinkers, the architects, the algorithm developers, to see better ways of building the overall system."

Asked by Kramer for some advice for young engineers, Samueli mentioned dealing with the heightened degree of uncertainty, and the disruption of entire industries, as an opportunity.

Also: Google's AI Co-scientist is 'test-time scaling' on steroids. What that means for research

"Industries have been disrupted by technology for a hundred years, that's nothing new. But the key is what new industries get created to replace the ones that are disrupted?" said Samueli. 

"These days, it's becoming more and more of a challenge to figure that out. So, that is really the advice to give these young kids: be flexible, be adaptable. This is the most disruptive time we've seen in the history of technology. And it's exciting, but it's also scary."

IEEE's first $2 million award

Samueli's is the first $2 million award in over 100 years of the IEEE Medal; previously, the award was $50,000. The organization decided last year to raise the amount to "elevate our recognition of extraordinary individuals," according to the IEEE's 2024 CEO, Thomas Coughlin.

Past IEEE Medal recipients include Google fellow Vint Cerf for innovations that helped to found the internet, in 2023, Gordon Moore, Intel co-founder, for fundamental contributions to integrated circuits (2008), and Morris Chang, founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (2011).