IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 5

part of an ad hoc group at TI typically operating outside
of the company's official marketing structure.
Question 4: As a pioneer in digital signal processing
(DSP), did you anticipate the diverse range of applications
that would eventually emerge from this technology?
Could you also describe some of the most exciting
and unexpected ways that DSP technology has been
utilized?
Gene Frantz: This is a hard question to respond to as
the role I played was more of a cheer leader rather than
a market creator. The startup companies we met consisted
of very bright and capable young engineers just
out of college, sometimes with their college professor.
They were engaging in an opportunity that had yet to
exist. They needed encouragement as much as direction
and support. I have told the story many times about
my listening to their new idea and looking them right
in their face and saying, " Yes that is possible. " " Make it
happen. " In a sense, I was lying to them as I had only a
hunch about it being possible as no one had ever done it
before. Slowly it got around that if I (TI) said it could be
done, then it could be done.
My personal marketing concept was, and still is, to
find the system " itch " and scratch it with a " technological
solution " we could provide or create. It is worth noting
that an advantage we had was TI's broad portfolio
of components. We weren't just selling DSP but we were
offering technology futures.
At this point allow me to tell a few stories about some
of the exciting ways that DSP technology was being
used.
■ Several of our technical team members were eating
lunch together. One of the people at the table
said he had read an article about an automotive
company in the U.K. who was using a DSP to control
an active suspension on their race car. We
were surprised when we learned that they were
using a TI DSP.
■ We had a customer designing a doll that could
talk and listen to their " mommy. " The doll's name
was Julie. To our surprise it used one of our DSPs
and several speech algorithms that our speech research
team had created to make it work. Both we
and the company we worked with (Worlds of Wonder)
were amazed at the capabilities Julie had.
■ We were visiting customers in the Baltimore area.
Our local salesperson arranged a visit with the
Johns Hopkins Medical School and meet with a
couple of professors who were trying to create
artificial vision for the blind. We were excited to
meet such a team and they were excited to meet
THIRD QUARTER 2023
us to see what technology we could support them
with. It was a great collaborative opportunity that
amazed both the researchers and us.
■ Several years back we learned that there was research
going on in the automotive world to create
autonomous vehicle technology. We engaged with
several companies with not only our DSP technology,
but with all the other components TI could
provide.
I could go on, but the stories tend to have the same
theme: We discovered companies in a new emerging
market that needed DSP capability who were excited to
find us looking for them.
Question 5: What do you believe are the recent major
advancements in DSP technology, and how have you
seen the DSP market evolve over the years? Additionally,
what opportunities do you see for DSP technology
in emerging fields such as machine learning, cloud computing,
and personal medical devices?
Gene Frantz: Many years ago, I gave a talk entitled " DSP
is dead, long live DSP. " Not surprisingly it was better
received by our customers than our management. My
message was DSP was evolving so that each new generation
of devices was a regeneration rather than an extension.
I still see occurrences of the regeneration of signal
processing. I have a professor friend at MIT, Alan Oppenheim,
who stated " there will always be interesting new
signals to be processed. Therefore, there will always be
a need for digital signal processing. " The only change I
would make to this statement is to replace DSP with SP
(signal processing). Each new generation of DSP devices
found a new set of opportunities.
I am presently seeing another regeneration in a couple
of ways. The first is the movement from integrated
components to integrated systems. I began noticing that
trend about 20 years ago. It seemed to first appear on
the integrated circuit side of the market as the semiconductor
manufacturing process for memories, processors,
power management, and real-world interfaces had
drifted apart from each other to remain on Moore's Law.
The result of the drifting apart meant a system could not
be optimally created in one silicon process. We realized
that to create an optimal system component, multiple
components would have to be integrated onto the same
substrate rather than the same integrated circuit. That
was the beginning of Octavo Systems, LLC, the company
I helped create with two other ex-TI employees. That
is, to pursue the concept of heterogeneous integration
(HI), or as we called it " System in Package (SiP) technology. "
It was our vision that integrated circuit innovations
were beginning to move away from the front end of
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