Rabaey has made major contributions to a number of fields including low power integrated circuits, advanced wireless systems, mobile devices, sensor networks, and ubiquitous computing.

He is the primary author of the “Digital Integrated Circuits: A Design Perspective” textbook that has served to educate hundreds of thousands of students all over the world.

After receiving his Ph.D. degree in Applied Sciences from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium in 1983, he joined the University of California, Berkeley as a Visiting Research Engineer.

From 1985 to1987 he was a research manager at imec, Belgium, and in 1987 he joined the faculty of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department of the University of California, Berkeley.

He was director of the DARPA/SRC co-funded multi-university GSRC and MuSyC research centers, and served as the Electrical Engineering Division Chair at Berkeley twice.