Taiwanese-American entrepreneur
Teresa Huai-Ying Meng (Chinese: 孟懷縈; pinyin: Mèng Huáiyíng; born 1961) is a Taiwanese-American academician and entrepreneur. She is the Reid Weaver Dennis Professor of Electrical Engineering, Emerita, at Stanford University, and founder of Atheros Communications, a wireless semiconductor company acquired by Qualcomm, Inc.
In 2007, Meng was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering for pioneering the development of distributed wireless network technology.
Early life and education
Meng, born and raised in Taiwan, graduated from the National Taiwan University with a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering. She received her Ph.D. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley in 1988 and 1985, respectively. She is the daughter of Shih-Ko Meng, an industrial engineer by training, who foresaw the importance of IC technology and co-founded the first semiconductor manufacturing company in Taiwan in the 1970s. Meng's mother was an accountant.
Career
She joined the Stanford faculty in 1988.[1] Her research activities in the first 10 years focused on low-power circuit and system design, video signal processing, and wireless communications. In 1998, Prof. Meng took leave from Stanford and founded Atheros Communications, Inc., which developed semiconductor system solutions for wireless network communications products.
After returning to Stanford in 2000, Meng continued her teaching and research, and turned her research interest to applying signal processing and IC design to bio-medical engineering. She collaborated with Prof. Krishna Shenoy on neural signal processing and neural prosthetic systems.[2] She also directed a research group exploring wireless power transfer and implantable bio-medical devices.
Prof. Meng retired from Stanford in 2013. She serves on the boards of Ambarella and the Alliance Cultural Foundation International and is Advisor to Atmosic Technologies.
In 2019, Meng was the recipient of the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell medal. This marked the first time a female was the recipient of the award. Meng was awarded this due to her contributions and leadership in the development of wireless semiconductor technology.[3]
Atheros Communications
In 1998, Meng took leave from her post at Stanford University to found Atheros Communications, a company which focused on technology for wireless communications. A provider of Wi-Fi technologies and solutions, Atheros went public in 2004. In 2006, Atheros partnered with mobile CDMA leader, Qualcomm, to create integrated cellular and Wi-Fi solutions, with initial application in the smartphone. The partnership culminated in the Qualcomm acquisition of Atheros in 2011.[4] In her role as founder of Atheros, Meng was named one of Top 10 entrepreneurs of the Year by Red Herring (2001), and received the 20/20 Vision Award, CIO Magazine (2002), and Innovator of the Year, MIT Sloan Business School (2002).
Meng has been credited by the IEEE for her CMOS-integrated radio-frequency innovations, which led to the availability of inexpensive wireless data communications that fueled the wireless revolution by enabling low-cost, high-performance LANs.[5]
