One of Jeremiah's most rewarding projects at TI was leading architecture and systems development for the company's first 64x-based media processor – and then collaborating with customers who used the improved video compression and vision processing to create new markets for digital video.

Those markets included networked surveillance cameras and digital video recorders, Internet streaming, high-definition telepresence and automotive rear-view cameras.

The experience helped him understand how putting innovative TI technology in the hands of creative customers can fuel customers' own innovation. First you solve customers' problems by supporting high-quality video over the Internet, for example, and then you watch them create breakthrough new applications for end users.

His experience has also taught him about the relationship between breakthrough innovations (which open up whole new worlds) and incremental innovations (which are more like the methodical day-to-day exploration of those worlds). In the wake of a breakthrough innovation, he says, it usually takes many additional incremental innovations to produce cost-effective, practical products.

Today he's a TI Fellow and video CTO for the Embedded Processing Business Unit, but what would he be doing if he weren't an engineer? Creative writing was one of his favorite subjects in school, and he has always dreamed of writing a best-selling novel.

But don't expect him to strike off in that direction anytime soon. He's still enjoying the rewards of his TI job too much: getting to see the results of his work put to use in cool new products.