Fernando often meets with university students, and he encourages them to study as widely as possible. The broader your background, he says, the more tools you’ll have to attack a problem from different angles.

Fernando has had his own share of cultural variety, having grown up in Venezuela and then pursued higher education, culminating in a Ph.D., in the United States, where he became a citizen in 2005. He has 17 U.S. patents to date and more in the pipeline.

As part of TI’s R&D System Architectures Lab, he works with his team to push the limits of technology and look for new growth opportunities and markets for TI, such as software-defined networking, which will bolster the power of networks, cloud computing and Web-enabled services. His ideas come from numerous sources, including brainstorming and sharing ideas with peers and students, which is his favorite approach.

Fernando’s first project at TI has colored everything he’s worked on since. He was part of a team responsible for creating a modem for broadband residential Internet access. The team worked on the modem’s digital signal processor as well as the necessary hardware accelerators and analog components. And it was that solid understanding of the overall system that they acquired – the big-picture perspective – that enabled the team to come up with the best mix of technology.

True innovation, he added, requires dreaming of “crazy things” that customers and end users may not have even imagined yet. He thinks sometimes the world doesn’t know what it wants because no one has thought of it yet, and so innovators need to push themselves to imagine what the world will use. True innovation, he believes, changes daily life. It’s vital to give customers what they ask for, he added, but it’s important not to stop there.