Dr. Howard Yang is powering today’s electronics with innovative integrated circuits.
Dr. Howard Yang returned to China from Silicon Valley in 1994 with a desire to design chips that could power the electronic devices people use every day. As the first integrated circuit (IC) design engineer to return following his university education and early career in the United States, Howard was a forerunner in return migration, an important trend that contributed to China’s success in high tech.
In 1997, Howard co-founded Newave Technology Corp., the first VC-funded IC design house in China. Newave merged with a major US integrated circuit company in 2001, ranking among China’s top 10 mergers of the year.
Howard went on to co-found Montage Technology in 2004. Montage is a world-leading IC design company dedicated to providing high-performance, low-power IC solutions for cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Today, Montage’s chips support about 50% of the world’s data transportation between CPUs and memory in data centers, so when people connect to the internet, they would be using Montage’s chip one out of every two times they access websites or send and receive messages.
In addition, Howard and his team invented the distributed architecture used in DDR4 and DDR5 memory subsystems. This architecture was adopted as an industry standard by JEDEC, a global organization that develops open standards and publications for various microelectronics technologies. His contribution to the industry has been recognized with several honors, including IEEE Life Fellow in 2022, the JEDEC Distinguished Executive Leadership Award in 2020 and the IEEE CAS Industrial Pioneer Award in 2002.