Imec honors Apple’s Johny Srouji with the 2025 Innovation Award

LEUVEN (Belgium), MARCH 18, 2025 — Imec – a global leader in nanoelectronics and digital technology research and innovation – announced today that Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware technologies, will receive the 2025 imec Innovation Award. The award recognizes Srouji’s pivotal role in shaping Apple’s technology roadmap through his leadership in the development of Apple silicon. In doing so, he has not only redefined Apple’s products, but has also had a major impact on the broader semiconductor ecosystem, spurring the advancement of chip technology that elevates features, experiences, and AI to new heights. Johny Srouji will receive the imec Innovation Award at the ITF World conference in Antwerp, Belgium (May 20-21).

Since joining Apple in 2008 to lead the development of the A4 chip – the company’s first in-house designed system on a chip (SoC) – Johny Srouji has built and led a world-class team of engineers driving innovation across Apple’s hardware technologies. Their work has fueled major advancements in Apple silicon, batteries, cameras, storage controllers, sensors, displays, and other critical components that define Apple’s product lineup.

After consistently leading the smartphone market with SoC designs prioritizing performance per watt, Srouji and his team brought their scalable architecture to the Mac, offering faster performance, enhanced capabilities, and category-leading battery life. Earlier this year, Apple launched C1, its first ever cellular modem system delivering excellent 5G and satellite connectivity while being far more energy efficient. Across all these innovations and more, the discipline to create and maintain a scalable architecture has yielded enormous benefits, and Apple’s chip designs are driving new strategies in the industry.

“As artificial intelligence integrates into nearly every aspect of modern technology – from personal planning tools to digital assistants – the demand for high-performance, energy-efficient and battery-powered hardware such as smartphones, tablets, laptops and smartwatches has never been greater. Meeting this demand requires advanced semiconductor technologies and architectures that deliver superior performance while minimizing power consumption. Johny’s vision in leveraging deeply scaled semiconductor technology to achieve this is driving the next wave of chip architectures that will revolutionize consumer electronics and edge computing. For these contributions, Johny Srouji is a deserving recipient of this year’s Innovation Award,” said Luc Van den hove, CEO of imec.

“It is a great honor to be recognized by imec and receive its most prestigious Innovation Award, which I humbly share with my colleagues at Apple,” said Johny Srouji. "Our goal is always to create differentiated technologies to enable the world’s best products. Creating and incorporating bleeding-edge advancements while maintaining our intense focus on power efficient performance, we look forward to solving hard problems and unlocking new possibilities through our continued partnership with imec and collaboration across the industry."

Before joining Apple, Johny Srouji held senior positions at Intel and IBM, where he contributed to processor development and design.

Since its launch in 2016, the imec Innovation Award has become a prestigious recognition for pioneers in the semiconductor industry. This year’s award ceremony will be held at ITF World (May 20-21, 2025), bringing together over 2,000 industry executives at the Royal Elizabeth Hall in Antwerp, Belgium.  View the conference program and register at https://www.imec-int.com/en/events/itf-world.