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. He was Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering from 1999 to 2001 and chaired the Institute of Computer and Network Engineering (IDA) from 1992 until his official retirement in 2024.
His research activities include embedded system design and cyber-physical systems. The activities are or have been supported by the German "Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft", DFG, (corresponds to the U.S. NSF), by the German BMBF and BMWi, by the European Union, and by industrial contracts, such as from Airbus, Bosch, BMW, Daimler, Draeger, Elektrobit, Ford, GM, Hitachi, Huawei, IAV, Mercedes-Benz, NXP, Intel, Siemens, Thales, Toyota, or Volkswagen. He gave numerous keynotes, 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, real-time and safety critical systems, and system modeling and verification. Symtavision, a spin-off from his group and now part of DXC Technology, has commercialized the performance analysis and optimization tool, SymTA/S, which is widely used by automotive and other companies throughout the world. He received the Technology Transfer Award 2008 of the Braunschweig Region Chamber of Industry and Commerce, and was an advisor to the German Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action for the high-tech entrepreneurship program EXIST (www.exist.de) from 2006-2016.
He chaired major international events, such as the International Conference on Computer Aided Design of VLSI (ICCAD), EMSOFT, CODES+ISSS, ESWEEK, ECRTS, or the Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) Conference&Exhibition, and was Chair of the European Design Automation Association (EDAA), the main sponsor of DATE. For more than 15 years, he has served in many functions of the DFG, as an elected member (Fachkollegiat) and Deputy Spokesperson of the "Computer Science" review board, and as a member of the DFG Senat Committee for Collaborative Research Centers. He represented the DFG at TU Braunschweig as a DFG Liaison Officer from 2012 to 2020. Since 2017, he has been a jury member of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize.
He is an IEEE Fellow, a DATE Fellow, and served as an ACM-SIGDA Distinguished Lecturer. He is a member of the German National Academy of Science and Engineering, acatech. He received the EDAA Achievement Award 2014.