Hannu Tenhunen received the Diploma Engineer degree in electrical engineering and computer sciences from Helsinki University of Technology, Helsinki, Finland, in 1982 and PhD degree in microelectronics from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, in 1986. During 1978–1982, he was with Electron Physics Laboratory, Helsinki University of Technology. From 1983 to 1985, he was with Cornell University as a Fulbright Scholar. From September 1985, he was with the Signal Processing Laboratory, Tampere University of Technology, Finland, as an Associate Professor and head of department. He was also a Coordinator of the National Microelectronics Program of Finland during 1987–1991. Since January 1992, he has been with Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden, where he is a Chair Professor in the electronic system design. At KTH he was the dean of School of Information Technology 2002-2005. For period 2006-2011 he was director of Turku Centre of Computer Science (TUCS), Finland. He has been a part time inivited professor at University of Turku. He has an honorary doctorate and honorary professor degrees and has received a Mangolian Silver Award and Metal from the city of Shanghai for his contributions there. His current research interests are VLSI circuits and systems for autonomic and smart systems and IoT. He has been actively involved in several EU programs on VLSI/ system-on-a-chip. He was, at European level,  the education director of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology, EIT Digital, 2006-2011. He has published over 950 reviewed publications and holds 9 international patents. His google scholar number of citations is 15116 and h-index is 53.

research focus on smart systems and electronics. In addition , active work on Challenge Driven Education model and innovation policies connected to that.