Mentoring others was the best part of Baher's role as an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Concordia University in Montreal. But something was missing. He also wanted to play an active part in getting innovative ideas from the lab through the product design cycle and into customers' hands.

At TI Baher can do both. He believes one of the key contributions he's made at TI is mentoring and coaching dozens of analog designers over the last 15 years. Engineers he worked with early in their careers in the '90s are today in technical leadership roles and continue to make an impact across the company. On each team he's led, he has strived to develop a culture of collaborative innovation in which team members are encouraged to challenge ideas and ask for help.

An IEEE Fellow, TI Senior Fellow, Kilby Labs board member and CTO in TI's Embedded Processing business, Baher has managed technical efforts to integrate analog and mixed-signal technology into digital CMOS from 180 nm to 28 nm, initiated a team to find a way to integrate analog and RF into advanced processes, and enabled the industry's lowest-power A/D converters for wireless handsets, among other key innovations. Today he oversees a variety of projects in Kilby Labs, coaching and mentoring the creative engineers who pass through the labs to work on a variety of disruptive technologies.

Baher believes that to produce truly innovative results chip designers need to focus on identifying the right problems to be solved, the ones that make the biggest difference to equipment manufacturers. Lately a big focus for him has been seeking novel solutions to enabling low-power sensors that will likely one day be used in virtually every aspect of our lives.