High award for Apple's chip boss

In a way, it is a prize for his life's work: Johny Srouji, Senior Vice President of Hardware Technologies at Apple, is awarded this year's Innovation Award by the Belgian Research Association IMEC. Srouji's groundbreaking contribution to the semiconductor industry and its central role in the development of the Apple Silicon should appreciate the honor. SROUJI will accept the price in Antwerp in May, the association said In a press release with.

Srouji accompanied Apple's own development of chips from the beginning. After entering the company in 2008, he took over the management of the development of the A4 chip, with which Apple made himself independent from other chip manufacturers and initiated further development up to the Apple Silicon. Srouji had worked in leading functions at Intel and IBM before Apple.

A number of milestones

In 2013, Apple released the world's first 64-bit mobile processor with the A7 chip in the iPhone 5S. In 2020 the jump on the Mac took place: In November 2020, the M1 debut in MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Mac Mini and scattered doubts that the performance of the smartphone processors was not so easy to transfer to the Mac. With M1 Pro, M1 Max and the M1 Ultra, further processors quickly followed for higher requirements.

At the same time, SroUji with his teams also developed tailor-made chips for the Airpods (H1 and H2), the S-chips for the Apple Watch and recently the first mobile phone modem Apple, the C1.

Revolution promoted

A focus in the award is to support Apple's recent efforts to support AI: “Using Johny's vision, semiconductor technologies with high scalability in order to achieve this, the next wave of chip architectures is progressing, which will revolutionize entertainment electronics and the Edge Computing,” says IMEC boss Luc van den Hove. The IMEC, founded in 1984, is the world's largest independent research and innovation center for nanoelectronics and digital technology.