Co-Creator of Ethernet and UT Professor Emeritus Receives Turing Prize
- Mar 30, 2023
[Editor's Note: This story is part of a Texas Global series celebrating UT Austin faculty members whose work has received international honors or awards.]
Bob Metcalfe, professor emeritus in the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, was named the recipient of the 2022 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) A.M. Turing Award for the invention, standardization and commercialization of Ethernet.
“Ethernet was the plumbing upgrade the internet needed in the 1970s,” Metcalfe said. “Ethernet enabled the transition from Arpanet, a network of time-shared computers servicing dumb terminals, to an internetwork of personal computers, their servers, and routers.”
The ACM A.M. Turing Award, often called the “Nobel Prize of computing,” includes a $1 million prize, with financial support provided by Google.
“It is dangerous to accept an award for developing Ethernet, which turns 50 on May 22, 2023,” Metcalfe said. “Over Ethernet’s 50 years, hundreds of people have earned some claim of inventorship. Join me in saying to these folks, ‘Thank you.’”
Before retiring from UT Austin in 2021, Metcalfe led innovation initiatives in the Cockrell School of Engineering and across campus for a decade. He is the founding director of the Texas Innovation Center, which launched in 2011 to help faculty members and students bring their scientific and engineering discoveries to market. He envisioned helping Austin become a better version of Silicon Valley.
Today, Ethernet is the main conduit of wired network communications around the world, handling data rates from 10 Mbps to 400 Gbps, with 800 Gbps and 1.6 Tbps technologies emerging. Ethernet has also become an enormous market, with revenue from Ethernet switches alone exceeding $30 billion in 2021, according to the International Data Corporation.
Learn more about Metcalfe's work via the Cockrell School of Engineering website.
