2025 IEEE Medal of Honor Laureate Honored for Revolutionizing Broadband Communications

February 20, 2025

It all began with a radio — specifically, a vacuum tube AM/Short-wave radio kit built for a 7th-grade school project in southern California.

The builder was Henry Samueli, and that radio would spark a lifelong passion for electrical engineering that would eventually impact nearly every person in the world. Along the way, Samueli pioneered methods to integrate analog signals like radio frequencies with digital signals on a single chip for the commercial market. Those ideas have played a key role in the development of core pieces of communications infrastructure like transceivers, switches and routers that make up the global Internet network. And they appear in billions of consumer electronics devices — including smartphones, set-top boxes, tablets, laptops and IoT devices that connect to this network.

For those achievements, Henry Samueli the founder of Broadcom, is the 2025 IEEE Medal of Honor Laureate and the first recipient of its $2 million prize. This honor was announced in an unprecedented press conference held in New York City on February 20, 2025.

“Henry Samueli helped revolutionize how the world is connected, fostered cultural and economic paradigm shifts of countless industries and positively changed how we do everything today,” said K. J. Ray Liu, 2022 IEEE President and CEO.

His teacher initially wanted him to stick with the simple crystal radio that other students were assigned. But Samueli wanted something more challenging. Samueli said that the teacher eventually relented, and he spent months building the radio, soldering connections night after night for more than four months.

“I plugged it in, and it worked. We were all pretty amazed that, first time out, the thing worked without any issues,” Samueli said. “It really had a huge impact on me, and struck my curiosity in ways I can’t really describe. It made me focus the rest of my educational career on figuring out how that radio worked, and that meant becoming an electrical engineer.”

World-Changing Impact

Henry Samueli was born the son of Polish immigrants. He often worked in their Los Angeles liquor store. He attended UCLA for his undergraduate and PhD studies, living at home with his parents to save money.

After graduating, Samueli worked in the defense industry for five years before returning to academia at UCLA, where his research focused on digital signal processing architectures for broadband communications chips.

At the time, access to the internet relied on slower voice-band modems that transmitted and received signals over telephone lines. Though he never envisioned himself an entrepreneur, Samueli eventually started Broadcom to commercialize the nascent broadband technology.

The company found early success developing a single-chip DOCSIS (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) cable modem that allowed cable TV operators to provide broadband internet access. Previous proprietary cable modems relied on several chips to process the digital and analog signals. DOCSIS was an open industry standard which enabled multiple vendors and mass deployments. Processing signals on a single chip paved the way for smaller, more efficient devices, significantly reducing the size, power consumption and cost of cable modems while improving their efficiency and reliability.

This breakthrough played a key role in enabling the widespread adoption of broadband internet services via cable TV networks and established Broadcom as a leading player in the semiconductor industry.

Today, nearly all internet traffic flows through at least one Broadcom chip somewhere in the network.

In addition to his contributions to technology, Samueli is known for major philanthropic efforts that have yielded significant social, economic and educational impacts. He and his wife Susan have donated more than $1 billion to organizations focusing on STEM education, underserved youth and integrative health. By endowing the Samueli Schools of Engineering at UCLA and UC Irvine, he has helped to ensure that future generations of students will be able to receive the same great education that he did.

The Legacy of IEEE’s Medal of Honor

The IEEE Medal of Honor is the organization’s highest award bestowed for remarkable, society-changing achievements such as the creation of the internet; development of lifesaving medical device technologies including the CAT scan, MRI, ultrasound and Pacemaker; as well as transistors and semiconductors, technologies at the heart of modern electronics and computing.

The IEEE Medal of Honor was established in 1917 and in the subsequent 100-plus years, innovations and advancements in technology, engineering and science have had an increasingly greater impact on our world. IEEE increased the IEEE Medal of Honor monetary prize from $50,000 to $2 million starting in 2025, to elevate this recognition of extraordinary individuals and the work they have done to benefit humanity to its rightful place in the echelons of the world’s most prestigious technology-focused prizes and awards.

Go Deeper: You can learn more about the history of the IEEE Medal of Honor with this ebook.