High honor for Apple's chip boss

In a way, it is a lifetime achievement award: Johny Srouji, Senior Vice President of Hardware Technologies at Apple, is being honored by the Belgian research association Imec with this year's Innovation Award. The award is intended to recognize Srouji's pioneering contribution to the semiconductor industry and his central role in the development of the Apple Silicon. Srouji will receive the award in Antwerp in May, the association announced in a press release.

Srouji has been involved in Apple's in-house chip development from the very beginning. After joining the company in 2008, he took the lead in the development of the A4 chip, which made Apple independent of other chip manufacturers and initiated the further development of Apple Silicon. Before Apple, Srouji had held management positions at Intel and IBM.

Several milestones set

In 2013, Apple launched the world's first 64-bit mobile processor with the A7 chip in the iPhone 5s. In 2020, the leap to the Mac followed: in November 2020, the M1 made its debut in the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Mac mini, dispelling doubts that the performance of smartphone processors could not be easily transferred to the Mac. With the M1 Pro, M1 Max and the M1 Ultra, further processors for higher requirements quickly followed.

At the same time, Srouji and his teams also developed customized chips for the AirPods (H1 and H2), the S-Chips for the Apple Watch and, most recently, Apple's first mobile modem, the C1.

Revolution driven forward

One focus of the award is on Apple's recent efforts to support AI: "Johny's vision of using semiconductor technologies with high scalability to achieve this is driving the next wave of chip architectures that will revolutionize consumer electronics and edge computing," says Imec CEO Luc Van den hove. Founded in 1984, Imec is the world's largest independent research and innovation center for nanoelectronics and digital technology.

(mki)