Rolf Ernst received a diploma in computer science and a Dr.-Ing. (with honors) in electrical engineering from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, in 81 and 87. From 88 to 89, he was a Member of Technical Staff in the Computer Aided Design & Test Laboratory at Bell Laboratories, Allentown, PA. Since 90, he has been a professor of electrical engineering at the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany, where he chairs a university institute of 65 researchers and staff. He was Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering from 1999 to 2001.

His research activities include embedded system design and design automation. The activities are currently supported by the German "Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft" (corresponds to the NSF), by the German BMBF, by the European Union, and by industrial contracts, such as from Intel, Thomson, EADS, Ford, Bosch, Toyota, and Volkswagen. He gave numerous invited presentations and tutorials at major international events and contributed to seminars and summer schools in the areas of hardware/software co-design, embedded system architectures, and system modeling and verification.

He chaired major international events, such as the International Conference on Computer Aided Design of VLSI (ICCAD), or the Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) Conference and Exhibition, and was Chair of the European Design Automation Association (EDAA), which is the main sponsor of DATE. He is a founding member of the ACM Special Interest Group on Embedded System Design (SIGBED), and was a member of the first board of directors. He is a member of the European Networks-of-Excellence ArtistDesign (real-time systems). He is an elected member (Fachkollegiat) and Deputy Spokesperson of the "Computer Science" review board of the German DFG (corresponds to NSF). He is an advisor to the German Ministry of Economics and Technology for the high-tech entrepreneurship program EXIST (www.exist.org).

He is an IEEE Fellow and served as an ACM-SIGDA Distinguished Lecturer. He is a member of the German Academy of Science and Engineering, acatech.