Leon O. Chua

A professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley, Dr. Leon O. Chua is widely recognized as the father of nonlinear circuit theory and cellular neural networks (CNN). The CNN architecture is the only one implemented into a practical fully-programmable chip for solving ultra-high-speed pattern recognition and image processing problems. The CNN universal machine chip is capable of a thousand times greater performance in speed, weight and power consumption than related technologies. Dr. Chua also invented a five-element circuit for generating chaotic signals. Aptly named the Chua Circuit, it is used by many researchers to design secure communications systems based on chaos.

An IEEE Fellow, he is a past president of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society and former editor of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems.