Hongjie Liu

We live in a world of devices that are rarely or never turned off—hearing aids, various types of sensors, augmented-reality devices, smartphones. But batteries don’t stay charged forever, so it’s critical to minimize devices’ power consumption. Hongjie Liu, 34, has created novel ultra-low-power chip designs that can extend battery life more than 10 times by more efficiently processing analog signals and digital data. “My innovation is analog preprocessing combined with mixed-signal computing, a novel processing architecture that mimics some of the principles of the human brain,” she says.