Changing the World One Wireless RF Chip at a Time

Moore's Lobby: Where engineers talk all about circuits

After beginning his career with Hewlett-Packard, David Su met a friend for lunch to learn about a new startup called Atheros. He was so excited by the vision to develop world-changing products that Su “went for lunch and never left.” At Atheros, Su had a “front-row seat” developing wireless WAN technology that transitioned from novelty to necessity while Atheros grew from a startup to a billion-dollar behemoth. That little startup was eventually acquired by another company you may have heard of: Qualcomm.

And what led Su to get involved with another startup? Well, lunch, of course. Su and his friends recognized that they could use their design experience to help fix a problem that was partially of their own making: battery consumption for wireless RF products. This was the genesis of Atmosic.

With his decades of design experience, Su admits that he stands on the shoulders of giants when creating new low-power products. The company has recently expanded its RF IC offerings from Bluetooth to Zigbee and Matter over Thread.

When asked how an IC design team knows when they have become either too structured or too unstructured, Su thoughtfully answered that if you never create anything innovative or your chips don’t work, you have probably fallen into one of those two ditches.

You will want to join our host, Daniel Bogdanoff, as he discusses CMOS RF, energy harvesting, and the importance of teams with Su. They touch on many other interesting topics including:

-What he remembers most fondly from his days at Atheros.

-A development failure for one technology that led to success for another.

-The balance of circuits, system, and software design necessary to optimize product performance.