Simon received his MS and PhD degrees from the University of California at Berkeley. His industrial experience includes semiconductor memory design at National Semiconductor (1978-80) and semiconductor technology development at Hewlett Packard Labs (1980-85). He was an Assistant Professor at Cornell University (1985-88). Since 1988, he has been with Stanford University where he is now Professor of Electrical Engineering.

Simon has conducted extensive research in interconnect, RF-IC, and 3D-IC. He is a Fellow of IEEE. He served as the CEO of Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute (2001-03). He was a member of the team that founded Atheros Communications (acquired by Qualcomm), and was on the board of Pericom Semiconductor (acquired by Diodes Inc.).