"While attending Purdue, Professor Delp once told me an important part of being an engineer is constant learning. In the 33 years since I graduated, I was able to use the fundamentals I learned at Purdue to navigate changes in technology and industry. It allowed me to constantly learn and adapt, through many different areas of electronic design, before settling on 3d graphics, which I knew initially very little. My education at Purdue let me map many concepts from other technologies into this new area, including signal processing and control theory, and others. My education at Purdue is immensely valuable, and I’m honored to receive this award."

 

Mr. Emmett Kilgariff graduated from Purdue with a bachelor’s degree in 1980, and spent most of the 1980s working in many different areas of electronics. At Goodyear Aerospace, Mr. Kilgariff worked on satellite ground stations, switching power supplies, embedded processors, firmware, and laser photo recorders. At Motorola Microsystems, Mr. Kilgariff designed VME cards used for industrial automation and networking. While at Parallan, a Silicon Valley startup no longer around, Mr. Kilgariff developed early network servers. At Sun, Mr. Kilgariff caught the computer graphics bug and has been working on designing computer graphics hardware ever since. Mr. Kilgariff developed graphics processors at Sun, a couple of now defunct startups, Silicon Graphics and 3dfx.

In 2001, Mr. Kilgariff joined NVIDIA and has been Vice President of GPU Architecture since 2005. Mr. Kilgariff and his team have been responsible for many of NVIDIA’s GPU architectures, shipping hundreds of millions of GPUs. Mr. Kilgariff holds 43 patents with many more pending.

Mr. Emmett Kilgariff has been married to Mrs. Becki Kilgariff since 1996. They live in San Jose, California.