Affectionately known within TI as “The Godfather of MSP430,” Horst is the chief architect of the MSP430™ core. During his 40 year career at TI, Horst has found that the biggest challenge with innovation is not coming up with ideas, but narrowing down the pipeline to focus on the best ideas.

Horst continues to push microcontroller hardware to the next level. Today, his team is working toward a highly complex system-on-a-chip (SoC) solution and pondering questions such as how to enable 100 times the performance at a tenth of the power needed today. He leads a highly innovative team that is constantly looking for better solutions. They will carry a problem around with them in their head, revisiting the subject again and again until a solution comes to them.

Believing the most valuable solutions are those with long-term use, Horst strives to maximize the investment required. The MSP430, for example, has been in use for over 20 years, providing maximum value for TI’s customers. Horst emphasizes it’s critical to understand a customer’s environment and the problem they’re trying to solve. When you can multiply that across a broad customer base – understanding how to solve a set of problems for thousands of electronics manufacturers – the probability that the products will be used for a long period of time increases exponentially.