Professor Zhao Weisheng of Beihang University has received the 2026 IEEE CAS Mac Van Valkenburg Award, the highest individual honor conferred by the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society.

The announcement was made during the 2026 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) held in Shanghai. Professor Zhao received the award for his outstanding contributions and leadership in spintronics and its applications to memory and computing systems.

The Mac Van Valkenburg Award, established in 1985, is typically presented to only one scholar annually, recognizing sustained, outstanding technical and scientific contributions to the field of circuits and systems, as well as significant impact on the discipline's development. Professor Zhao is the youngest recipient in the award's history.

Professor Zhao was elected an IEEE Fellow in 2019. Addressing the technological frontier and major national needs of the post-Moore era, he has focused on the study of spintronic devices, low-power integrated circuits, and novel computing systems. He has established a cross-layer collaborative innovation framework encompassing device physics, circuit design, and system architecture, providing crucial support for the development of next-generation memory and computing chips.

Professor Zhao led his team to develop the world's first antiferromagnetic spintronic memory chip and facilitated the world's first mass production of third-generation SOT-MRAM (Spin-Orbit Torque Magnetic Random Access Memory) chips. His groundbreaking work has been published in leading international journals and conferences, including Nature Electronics, Proceedings of the IEEE, IEEE TCAS-I, and IEDM. As of May 2026, his Google Scholar citations exceed 32,000, with an h-index of 90.

Professor Zhao's numerous accolades include the Tencent Xplorer Prize, the Huawei OlympusMons Pioneer Award, the First Prize of Beijing Natural Science Award, the First Prize of Natural Science Award from the Chinese Institute of Electronics, and the First Prize of Technical Invention Award from the China Instrument and Control Society.

For two decades, Professor Zhao has been an active contributor to the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society and other international academic organizations, demonstrating outstanding leadership in scholarly community building, journal development, and academic service. He served as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers and a member of the IEEE Fellow Evaluation Committee from 2020 to 2023. He has chaired major international conferences, including IEEE ISICAS 2025 and IEEE/ACM GLSVLSI 2020. He is also a recipient of the Best Paper Award of IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems and the Guillemin‑Cauer Best Paper Award of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems.

Editor: Lyu Xingyun