Kneron Co-Founder Dr. M.C. Frank Chang Awarded Engineering’s Highest Honor for Chip Innovations Driving the NPU Era

Dr. M.C. Frank Chang, co-founder of Kneron and a distinguished professor at UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has been awarded the 2025 John Fritz Medal, one of the most prestigious lifetime honors in the engineering world. The medal, often described as the “Nobel Prize of Engineering,” has been historically awarded to innovators such as Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Orville Wright, Guglielmo Marconi, Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and Elon Musk.

The honor recognizes Dr. Chang’s decades-long contributions to high-frequency semiconductor devices, mixed-signal circuits, and advanced chip architectures, breakthroughs that laid the foundation for modern wireless communications and, more recently, next-generation AI processing.

Award Highlights Dr. Chang’s Impact on the Evolution of NPU Technology

Dr. Chang’s engineering achievements span pioneering work in heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) technology, ultra-high-speed data converters, and high-frequency integrated transceiver circuits. These innovations have influenced nearly every corner of today’s semiconductor landscape, from mobile communications to high-performance computing.

In recent years, his work has become increasingly relevant to the rise of Neural Processing Units (NPUs). As co-founder of Kneron, Dr. Chang helped guide the company’s technological direction as it developed energy-efficient AI accelerators designed for inference at the edge, an area gaining momentum as the AI industry confronts the limitations of GPU-heavy infrastructure.

A Turning Point in AI Hardware

The award comes as global AI demand continues to surge, intensifying concerns around power consumption and scalability. Traditional GPU-based systems are struggling to support AI’s explosive growth due to high energy usage and increasing operational constraints.

Kneron’s NPU architecture, shaped in part by Chang’s foundational semiconductor research, offers an alternative that emphasizes efficiency, localized processing, and sustainability. These capabilities are particularly important for applications in smart vehicles, security systems, AIoT devices, and distributed AI deployments.

Prestigious Milestone for Kneron and the Semiconductor Industry

The John Fritz Medal is one of the oldest and most respected recognitions in engineering, established in 1902 to honor lifetime achievement and transformative contributions to science and industry. Dr. Chang’s inclusion among its recipients underscores the long-term value of his work and the growing importance of specialized AI processors in the global tech ecosystem.

UCLA’s official announcement of the award is available here:
https://samueli.ucla.edu/ucla-engineering-professor-m-c-frank-chang-receives-john-fritz-medal-for-chip-innovations/

Looking Ahead

As AI continues to move beyond centralized cloud models and into vehicles, homes, factories, and edge environments, the industry shift toward inference-optimized hardware is accelerating. Dr. Chang’s recognition not only celebrates a lifetime of engineering breakthroughs but also highlights the strategic path forward for AI chip design.

For Kneron, the award reinforces its role in shaping the future of efficient, scalable AI computing, an increasingly critical challenge as global demand shows no signs of slowing.