Twente’s chip design wizard Bram Nauta awarded the Stevin Prize

Chip designer Bram Nauta (1964) has been awarded the Stevin Prize, the Netherlands’ highest recognition for social impact as a result of groundbreaking research. Having recently celebrated his 25th anniversary at the University of Twente’s Integrated Circuit Design (ICD) department, Nauta enjoys worldwide renown for his IC designs, some of which have been implemented in chips used in smartphones, medical implants, aircraft and many other applications. These chips have sold in the billions.

Nauta’s most famous innovation may be the eponymous “Nauta circuit,” which he developed in the early nineties as part of his PhD thesis. Nauta devised a so-called differential transconductor, which was used to build an analog filter that can precisely lift the desired signal from a large number of signals. Applied in CMOS, the IC was orders of magnitude faster than anything on the market at that time. Consequently, mobile phones use less energy, data can be transported more quickly and the signal becomes significantly stronger.