Engineer and physicist John O'Sullivan took out the $300,000 prize at Parliament House last night.

An estimated 800 million electronic devices, ranging from mobile phones to traffic lights, use the wireless technology developed by Dr O'Sullivan and a team from CSIRO in 1991.

He said he was ''over the moon'' after learning he had won and described the prize as recognition for his colleagues as well as himself.

Dr O'Sullivan was working as an astronomer when he developed the fast Fourier transform chip, which helped process and ''clean up'' fuzzy intergalactic radio waves.

The same technology proved to be the key to creating high-speed wireless networks, untangling radio frequencies and keeping wireless signals clear.

It was adopted as an industry standard in the computing world but CSIRO did not see a cent from its patent until June this year when it received $200million in royalties after a legal battle.

Dr O'Sullivan said he was ''blown away'' by the impact of his invention.

''When we started out, we were at the beginnings of portable computing and we were just seeing networking take off. We thought if we could just manage to cut the wires and keep the speed over wireless then there was huge potential,'' he said.

''Wi-Fi technology finds itself embedded in everything from laptops, notebooks, hand-held computers, mobile phones and games consoles. We're even seeing it in cars, maybe even cars talking to other cars to avoid collisions.''

Other winners on the night included geoscientist Len Altman, who won a prize for excellence in secondary school teaching as well as primary school teacher Allan Whittome.

Nanotechnology researcher Amanda Barnard won for Physical Scientist of the Year.

Dr Barnard regularly uses the Australian National University's supercomputer to simulate how nanoparticles will behave.

Obesity expert Michael Cowley, of Monash University in Melbourne, won the Science Minister's Prize for Life Science.