Jan Rabaey is professor emeritus at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) department of the University of California at Berkeley. He also served as the CTO of the Systems Technology Co-Optimization division at imec, Belgium.
He received the EE and PhD degrees in Applied Sciences from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, respectively in 1978 and 1983. From 1983 till 1985, he was connected to the University of California, Berkeley as a Visiting Research Engineer. From 1985 till 1987, he was a research manager at IMEC, Belgium, and in 1987, he joined the faculty of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department of the University of California, Berkeley, where he held the Donald O. Pederson Distinguished Professorship. He became Professor Emeritus and Professor in the Graduate School in 2019.
He has made major contributions to a number of fields including low power integrated circuits, advanced wireless systems, mobile devices, sensor networks, and ubiquitous computing. Some of the systems he helped envision include the infoPad (a forerunner of the iPad), PicoNets and PicoRadios (IoT avant-la-lettre), the Swarm (IoT on steroids), Brain-Machine interfaces and the Human Intranet. His current interests include the conception of the next-generation distributed systems, as well as the exploration of the interaction between the cyber and the biological worlds. Furthermore, he is the primary author of the influential “Digital Integrated Circuits: A Design Perspective” textbook that has served to educate hundreds of thousands of students all over the world.