This week, we announced five 2015 Modern Day Jacks – TIers who embody the innovative spirit of Jack Kilby.
Jack is best known as the inventor of the integrated circuit (IC), which revolutionized the electronics industry. He designed the first IC – or chip – at Texas Instruments in 1958, and went on to file dozens of patents throughout his engineering career. You can read more about the chip that Jack built here.
Our 2015 Modern Day Jacks are creating smaller and more efficient power supplies for our electronics, using sensors in ways never seen before, making coding easy and accessible, enabling us to see everything happening around our vehicles, and inventing quick and precise measurement products found in everything from factory floors to HVAC systems.
Meet this year’s five Modern Day Jacks:
Sameer Pendharkar, Gallium Nitride (GaN) Roadmap Manager, TI Fellow
Sameer spends his days focused on the power and potential of gallium nitride (GaN). GaN enables new power supply applications to operate at much higher switching frequencies than previously used silicon transistors at the same voltage. By using GaN in power supply applications (like a server), the power supply can be made smaller, lighter and more efficient as it won’t waste energy through heat loss. Sameer is in charge of the roadmap for the technology and directs a team of engineers on what they should focus on today, tomorrow and in the future.
“It is definitely an honor and a surprise to be named a Modern Day Jack. We develop technologies like GaN that essentially work towards fulfilling Jack Kilby’s vision – to have semiconductors do things that weren’t previously thought about,” Sameer said.
George Reitsma, Analog Design Engineer, Senior Member of Technical Staff
George has spent much of his time the last three years inventing the award winning LDC1000 with the rest of his team in our Silicon Valley office. The LDC1000 is the world’s first inductance-to-digital converter, enabling sensors to do what they have never done before. For instance, the LDC1000 can “look” through anything non-conductive, and even thin metals, to monitor movement or position on the other side of a material, often times in very harsh environments with high temperatures and lots of chemicals. George said he attributes success in his career to a willingness to put in extra effort, dream big and be unafraid to fail. He said he truly cares about the customers’ challenges and is motivated to solve problems in unique, interesting and new ways.
Robert Wessels, Software Engineer, Managing Director of Energia Project
Energia consists of two parts – a cross platform editor that is a highly integrated development environment for people to write code for TI’s MCU LaunchPad™ development kits, and a framework that makes writing that code easy. Robert said he developed Energia so that anybody – from hobbyists to makers to his grandma – could create using its libraries of code and its easy to use application programming interface (API). Within an hour, he can teach a novice how to get a LaunchPad kit to blink its LEDs and do serial communication using the Energia platform, he said.
“I don’t think I even come close to Jack Kilby himself, because he was one of the greatest pioneers in the semiconductor industry, so I am very humbled to be called a Modern Day Jack,” Wessels said.
Vikram Appia, Systems Engineer, Perception and Analytics Lab, Member of Group Technical Staff
By 2018, all new vehicles in the United States must include backup cameras. But Vikram is focusing on a future that goes well beyond one backup camera – he is working on automotive 3-D surround view that can create a virtual view of the full 360-degree surroundings of the vehicle from various viewpoints, as though the video was captured by a drone flying above the vehicle. Currently, the basic automotive 2-D surround view available on many high-end vehicles gives drivers a top-down view of the surroundings using four cameras with wide-angle lenses. It is our next generation 3-D surround view technology that will enable the driver to see one flawlessly stitched video of the 360-degree surroundings of the vehicle from multiple camera viewpoints. This new technology improves a driver’s situation awareness, there by enhancing safety and comfort. Vikram and his team developed the algorithms and built a prototype that demonstrates the technology to customers. Today, automotive surround view is available as part of the TDA2x/3x chip family.
Hector Torres, Senior Analog IC Design Lead, Senior Member of Technical Staff
The PGA900 signal conditioner, introduced earlier this year, quickly and precisely measures pressure, strain, flow or liquid levels for industrial, automotive, intelligent sensor networks, HVAC systems and white good applications. The signal conditioner was developed in response to a request by a customer to update their current technology primarily used in heavy machinery. But the PGA900 team – which drew upon experts from across TI – found an innovative way to create a solution that went well beyond the initial market and into adjacent ones. Hector spent much of his time on the pressure and temperature sensing programmable gain amplifiers inside the PGA900, creating from scratch the intellectual property needed to make the product work.
“It is such an incredible honor and extremely humbling just to be remotely associated or named in the same sentence as Jack Kilby. In my estimation, he is one of the greatest inventors in United States history,” Hector said.
Want to learn more about Jack Kilby Day? Watch this short video below, and tell us what you think about Jack Kilby and our Modern Day Jacks using #JackKilbyDay on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Instagram.
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