As a process development manager, Rajni's innovations are foundational to advanced product lines, providing new building blocks upon which TI's differentiated products are built. People can easily recognize innovation at a product level, Rajni explains, but a great deal of infrastructure work is needed to turn a high-level innovation, like a new microcontroller, into a successful product.

New products, circuits, or product families start with an idea or vision, and Rajni and her co-workers find the process to make it happen. This involves taking existing an established process technology and updating that node’s performance and manufacturability by improving process loops and adding new devices required to enable the new products. These high-level innovations drive the performance of new processes and devices.  But due to cost and time-to-market pressures, it’s important to find realistic ways to create new things. The end result must be practical for manufacturing and still provide the benefits that the new products need. It’s a puzzle for which Rajni makes the pieces fit.

Rajni compares her team’s impact to innovation to her quilting hobby. Take a traditional quilting block, execute it with new colors, combine the old and updated blocks with an original block and place in a new set, creating a unique quilt with strong ties to the past. The combination of changes can have a dramatic effect on the end result.