IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Industry Impact Award

Award Information

Established in 2019, this award will recognize and honor SSCS members who have had a seminal impact and made distinctive contributions to the field of solid-state circuits and the integrated circuits industry. The award recognizes extraordinary accomplishments in entrepreneurship, leadership and/or technical excellence that led to significant breakthroughs and paradigm shifts in the IC business, thereby enabling new products and services within the ten year period prior to the application deadline.

Those who receive this award must be a current SSCS Member in good standing.

This award will be given, annually, to one winner, but only if a suitable individual is identified. The winner will receive a plaque and honorarium of $5,000.

The call for nominations will be made in our primary member communications, the Solid-State Circuits Magazine and Society Newsletter. The nomination package consists of: (1) a one to two-page description of the candidate’s impact to the IC industry through technical development breakthroughs and successful product commercialization; (2) A list of patents, publications, and products to support the nomination; (3) A maximum of three letters of recommendation from people familiar with the candidate’s work.

This award will be managed by the SSCS Awards Committee, which consists of an appointed Chair, who will select additional members of the Committee or appoint sub-committees as needed to manage the award winner selection.

Award nominations will be accepted during the year prior to the year the award is presented. The deadline for submissions is October 15, 2024. The winner of the award will be notified by December 1st in the year prior to the year the award is to be presented.

The SSCS Award Committee or its appointed sub-committee shall evaluate nominations as to whether the nominee’s contribution is significant and merits consideration for the Award. A slate of selected nominees will be presented by the Awards Chair to the SSCS Administrative Committee and the winner will be selected by the SSCS Administrative Committee by vote.

This award will be presented at the plenary session of one of the SSCS financially sponsored conferences, at the choice of the recipient.

Submission Instructions

A platform called OpenWater is required to upload nomination packages. For detailed instructions on how to use the OpenWater platform, click here.

The following materials must be uploaded as part of the nomination package:

  1. One to two-page description of the candidate’s impact on the IC industry through technical development breakthroughs and successful product commercialization (PDF only, 25 MB Max).
  2. A list of the candidate’s publications, patents, and products to support the nomination (PDF only, 25 MB Max).

In addition, letters of recommendation must be submitted (maximum of three letters, PDF only, 25 MB Max). The nominator will submit names of those providing a letter of recommendation in the OpenWater system, and then the OpenWater system will send an email to those people asking them to upload their letter of recommendation.

Please note: SSCS AdCom members are ineligible for awards. A list of AdCom members can be found here.

Important Dates and Deadlines

This year’s application window is from 8/1/2024 at 12:00 AM to 10/15/2024 at 11:59 PM (UTC-05:00, UTC-04:00 Daylight.) If you have any questions, please use the form here.

IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Industry Impact Award Recipient

Sam Naffziger is the recipient of the 2023 IEEE SSCS Industry Impact Award

Samuel Naffziger is AMD senior vice president, Corporate Fellow, and Product Technology Architect. Naffziger works across the company to optimize product technology choices and deployment with a continued focus on driving best practice power/performance/area methodology to maximize product competitiveness, efficiency, and cost.

Naffziger has been the lead innovator behind many of AMD’s low-power features and chiplet architecture. He has over 32 years of industry experience with a background in microprocessors and circuit design at Hewlett Packard, Intel and AMD.

Naffziger received a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) and a Master of Science from Stanford. Naffziger holds more than 130 U.S. patents in the field and authored dozens of publications and presentations on processors, architecture and power management. He is an IEEE Fellow.

Sam Naffziger

Samuel Naffziger

Past Recipients

Year Recipient
2022 Vivek De, Intel Fellow and Director of Circuit Technology Research