Martin is not afraid of robots. He recognizes there is far too much information out there for mere humans to manage, and if we don’t relinquish control of that information, we’ll soon be overwhelmed. People are starting to get the idea, and they’re beginning to adopt applications to help, like a thermostat that understands human behavior and adjusts itself accordingly. Martin sees a whole wave of electronics coming that can help get humans out of the information loop, but first we’ll have to get comfortable with giving up some control. We’ll have to lose our fear of robots.

Martin challenges assumptions in everything he does. During his first years at TI about 20 years ago, he was working with a customer on embedded SerDes for our gate-arrays. The engineering team there wanted the serial links for box-to-box communications links. But Martin recognized they had another purpose as well. They could be used for intra-box communications, replacing a parallel backplane. This led to the design of the first serial-backplane Ethernet switches. Today, this is the only way a high-performance switch is built. Martin says innovation like this comes from looking beyond the current problem and having the curiosity to ask the right questions: how, what and why.

As the manager of TI’s Systems and Applications Labs, Martin likes to have his hands in a little bit of everything. These days he’s focused on the rapid evolution of networking and the research around how data is routed and how hardware can be optimized to manage it. He’s also fascinated by the opportunity to leverage common household devices, such as a bathroom scale, to continuously monitor people’s health and ultimately improve their lives.

He sees TI as a company that’s capable of enabling every type of electronic in the world and is especially well-suited to the devices at the edge of the network.