Chairman's Award for Innovation: Proximity Communication

The team invented a way for chips in a computer system to communicate with each other without wires. Placed face-to-face and in close proximity with each other, capacitance between the transmitter pads on one chip and the receiver pads on the other chip enables them to communicate.

This is a true breakthrough: The number of connections between chips using this method is much higher than with ball bonds (about 100+ times more dense); the chips can talk at higher speed with lower latency and much less energy than using wires. Because the processor-memory bottleneck is the biggest inhibitor to high performance in today's computers, Proximity Communication could have a huge impact on the computer performance.