Semi Sweet: Happy 20 Year Anniversary – TI WLAN Team

This post is a Semi Sweet, Friday retrospective

Que dreamy flashback

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Earlier in my career I never envisioned myself being an engineering manager – I was excitedly inventing and co-developing some of the coolest design and test tools and figuring out how to accelerate design validation and post-silicon test development

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End dreamy flashback

Finding Fun and Fear

Prior to being asked to start a new product silicon development team I’d been an individual technologist and a Team Leader, but this new opportunity was about becoming a Manager – a technical business manager for realzies and that was scary – so of course the answer was, YES!

No Going Back

Our team consisted of a single test engineer (Edgar Z) and me on the day our VP took us out of stealth mode and announced our charter to internally bootstrap a team with the goal to become a leading semiconductor supplier of WLAN ports – gulp

From Vapors to Viability

An experienced WLAN MAC / Phy design team had been acquired in relative stealth and had already pushed a couple pilot designs through their foundry, so part of our team tasks was to WIP the foundry design and silicon through our captive fab – a head-long plunge from the high-dive into process engineering and yield enhance began

The rapid rate in which we hired additional engineers (28 new team members in under 32 months) made for serious growing pains but everything held together – largely due to a very talented team-leader (Hari) I begged to move with me from my AMS/SoC DfT and BIST team to the newly formed WLAN silicon team

Viability to Victory

Super-scrub forward and in the next 32 months we built our product engineering and test development infrastructure from the bottom-up and successfully released to production the company’s first WLAN devices and with fantastic pull-through by our marketing and sales team (inc. Remi El Ouazzane) become the #2 silicon provider of WLAN ports in the industry – now that was fun!

Thanks for the Great Memories!

Hari Chandran

Jennifer Holub

Latha Kattaumenu

Johnny Lopez

Annie Quirante

Neil Simpson

Dave Truhan

Michelle Tuvera

Susan Vu

Edgar Zuniga

ACX WLAN Design Team

And many, many more