Richard Newton is an influential academic and industry leader in Silicon Valley. He has had enormous impact on the development of new high-technology start-up companies in Silicon Valley, and is a champion of important role universities can play in the creation of technology-based industries.

Professor Newton received the B. E. and M.Eng.Sci degrees from the University of Melbourne in 1973 and 1975 respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1978. He is currently Dean of the College of Engineering and the Roy W. Carlson Professor of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has been actively involved as a teacher and researcher in the areas of design technology, electronic system architecture, and integrated circuit design.

In addition to his academic role, Professor Newton has helped to found over a dozen Silicon Valley companies, including Cadence Design Systems and Synopsys, both based directly on his own research and that of his students and colleagues at Berkeley. From 1988 to 2002 he was also a Venture Partner with the Mayfield Fund, a high technology venture capital partnership, where he has contributed to both the evaluation and early-stage development of over two dozen new companies, including Silicon Light Machines, where he was the acting President and CEO during 1994 and 1995. Now a part of Cypress Semiconductor, Silicon Light Machines is bringing to market a number of revolutionary digital display systems using silicon micromachines. Professor Newton is currently a member of the Board of Directors of a number of Silicon Valley companies, including Synopsis, Tensilica, and Crossbow, and he has also been a member of the Technical Advisory Board of Microsoft Research Laboratories since 1997.

Four years ago, he founded the Gigascale Silicon Research Centre (GSRC) for silicon chip design and test. With an annual budget of US$9 million in 2002, the GSRC is a major private-public partnership with the US Government and the semiconductor industry that funds and coordinates research in a dozen major US universities and also involves many industrial collaborators.

A Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Newton has published extensively in his field and received numerous awards and honours, including best paper awards from the ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference, the International Conference on Computer Design, the European Solid State Circuits Conference and the IEEE Transactions for Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems.