Yale Nance Patt is an American professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds a special chair position called the Ernest Cockrell, Jr. Centennial Chair in Engineering. In 1965, Patt created the WOS module, which was the first advanced logic gate made on a single piece of silicon. He is a member of both the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2014, he was chosen to join the National Academy of Engineering.

Patt earned his bachelor's degree from Northeastern University and his master's and doctorate degrees from Stanford University, all in electrical engineering. His doctoral advisor was Richard Mattson.

Throughout his career, Patt has focused on advanced methods in computer design, including out-of-order processing and speculative architectures, such as HPSm, a system for high-performance microprocessors.

Patt is a co-author of the textbook Introduction to Computing Systems: From Bits and Gates to C and Beyond, now in its third edition published by McGraw-Hill. This book is used in undergraduate computing courses at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Pennsylvania, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The textbook introduces the LC-3 Assembly Language.

In 2009, Patt received an honorary doctorate from the University of Belgrade.

Teaching

• 1966–1967 Cornell University
• 1969–1976 North Carolina State University, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering
• 1976–1988 San Francisco State University, Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics
• 1979–1988 University of California-Berkeley, Adjunct Professor of Computer Science
• 1988–1999 University of Michigan, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering
• 1999–present University of Texas, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Awards

• 1995 IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award "for helping create powerful computer chips that are used in products sold to the public"
• 1996 Eckert–Mauchly Award "for developing methods to make computers process multiple tasks at once more efficiently"
• 1999 IEEE Wallace W. McDowell Award "for making important contributions to both the engineering field and teaching about high-performance computer chips"
• 2005 IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award "for making key discoveries that helped create faster computer processors"
• 2011 IEEE Computer Society B. Ramakrishna Rau Award "for leading and inspiring others in the field of microarchitecture through teaching, helping students, research, and community work"
• 2013 Harry H. Goode Memorial Award "for working in the field of information processing for almost 50 years, sharing knowledge about microarchitecture, writing a groundbreaking textbook, and training future leaders"
• 2014 Elected to the National Academy of Engineering "for helping develop advanced designs for high-performance computer chips"
• 2016 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science "for developing new methods to make modern microprocessors faster by figuring out which tasks can be done at the same time automatically"
• 2021 IEEE High Performance Computer Architecture Symposium Test of Time Award