Academician Chenming Hu was presented the 10th "Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award" at the 2011 Asian American Engineer of the Year (AAEOY) Awards and Conference in Seattle on February 26, 2011.

Dr. Hu is currently the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) Distinguished Chair Professor of Microelectronics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a board member of SanDisk Inc. He is a microelectronics visionary, whose research has contributed to making smaller, more reliable microchips with higher performance. Dr. Hu's transistor models, the BSIM series, are the world standards for simulating micro-circuits, and hundreds of billions of dollars worth of microchips have been designed using his models, which he provided to the industry free of charge. Dr. Hu's new transistor structure FinFET is expected to replace the old transistor used by the industry over the past four decades. His transistor will further allow the miniaturization of electronics.

The AAEOY is the only US national award program that pays tribute to engineers, scientists and corporate/government leaders of Asian origin each year. The AAEOY special awards, which are comprised of the "Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award" and the "Distinguished Science and Technology Award", were presented for the 10th time this year.

Academician Hu is an expert in applied physical sciences and engineering sciences. He was an Assistant Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1973-1976), a Professor of Electrical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley (1976-), the Chairman of the board of the East Bay Chinese School (1989-1991), the Founding Chairman of Celestry Design Technologies Incorporated (1995-2003), and the Chief Technology Officer of TSMC (2001-2004).

Dr. Hu has been granted over 100 US patents and published over 800 papers. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering (1997), a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and the Chancellor's Chair Professor of the University of California, Berkeley, and was an Honorary Professor of Tsing-Hua University, Beijing (1994-1998) and National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan (2001). Academician Hu has previously won the R&D 100 Award (1996), Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award (1997), the IEEE Jack Morton Award (1997), the Sigma Xi Monie Ferst Award (1998), the W.Y. Pan Foundation Award (for Distinguished Research 1999), the IEEE Solid State Circuit Award (2002), the IEEE Electron Devices Society Rappaport Award (2003), and the IEEE Nishzawa Medal (2009).