One of the College of Engineering’s biggest supporters has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, a pinnacle for professional engineers.
The academy, known as NAE, announced this week its 2026 membership roster includes Wally Rhines, CEO and director of Texas-based Silvaco and a member of multiple advisory boards within the University of Florida’s College of Engineering.
“Members are elected to NAE membership by their peers (current NAE members),” the academy noted on its website. “Members have distinguished themselves in business and academic management, in technical positions, as university faculty and as leaders in government and private engineering organizations.”
Rhines is a successful businessman, engineer and philanthropist who grew up shadowing his professor father at UF. Rhines, himself, never attended UF, but he has always been heavily invested in UF — monetarily, academically and emotionally.
“My parents believed that moving away from home is part of the value of a college experience,” he said. “In the end, my father concluded that Michigan had the best undergraduate engineering program in the U.S., and I concluded that it was right for me.”
Rhines is as much a part of Gator Engineering as Weil Hall, where his engineer father, Frederick, worked and eventually founded the college’s department of Materials Science and Engineering. The MSE building now bears the “Rhines” name in honor of his father.
In 2016, UF presented Rhines with an honorary doctorate degree of technology – UF’s highest honor.
“I come to Gainesville a couple of times a year for the Dean’s Advisory Board and the ECE (Electrical and Computer Engineering) advisory board, of which I’ve chaired,” he said.
Rhines attended Gainesville High School and held several local jobs.
“My first paid job at UF was in the Computer Science Department,” he recalled in a 2025 interview. “We were based in a small building on Archer Road with an IBM 709 mainframe computer along with an IBM 1401. The next summer (1966), I worked for Professor Robert Walker in the Chemical Engineering Department doing differential thermal analysis of materials. My final summer job during my undergraduate years was at the General Electric Battery Business in Alachua, north of Gainesville.”
“In 1962, for the summer, I worked in the stacks for 80 cents per hour looking for books that were incorrectly filed by Dewey Decimal Number,” he added. “In 1963, also as a summer job, I graduated to $1 per hour and worked on the UF Library inventory audit.”
He loved technical things and also worked at UF’s chemical engineering department.
“We had science fairs, which usually meant you worked with somebody at the university because they had labs and experts and so on,” he recalled.
After Rhines graduated from UM, he earned a master’s and doctorate at Stanford, and then an MBA from Southern Methodist University.
At Stanford, Rhines co-invented a blue light-emitting diode that served as a building block for another scientist’s Nobel Prize in Physics. After college, he worked at Texas Instruments for 21 years, leaving as executive vice president in 1993 to become CEO of Mentor Graphics for 24 years (chairman of the board for 17 of those years). During his tenure at Mentor, revenue nearly quadrupled and market value increased more than 10-fold, according to the company.
In 2020, Rhines joined software/semiconductor company Cornami. He left last summer and now serves as CEO and director of Silvaco, a software company for semiconductor and photonics design.
In 2021, the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) awarded Rhines its highest honor, the Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award.
Rhines never forgot about UF, particularly the College of Engineering. He established the Walden C. Rhines Endowed Professor for Quantum Engineering, which was given to Philip Feng, Ph.D. In 2023, and the Rhines Professorship in Hardware Security, given to UF’s Farimah Farahmandi, Ph.D., in 2024 for her hardware security research. Additionally, the Walden and Paula Rhines Endowed Professorship in Semiconductor Photonics was awarded to Volker Sorger, Ph.D.
In ECE, Rhines established the Rhines Professorship in Semiconductor Photonics. And in MSE, Rhines’ foundation also supports the Frederick N. Rhines Chair Professorship and two Rhines Rising Star Faculty Development Funds: the Larry Hench Fund and the Robert DeHoff Fund.
When former College of Engineering dean Cammy Abernathy was looking to expand hardware security studies at UF, she reached out to Rhines because of his experience as CEO of Mentor Graphics.
ECE Chair Mark Tehranipoor, Ph.D., considers Rhines a visionary leader in the semiconductor industry.
“His unwavering support and passion for the Gator Nation have been extraordinary,” Tehranipoor said. “His generosity toward the College of Engineering is evident in his establishment of multiple professorships, which serve as a testament to his lasting impact on UF.