TI CEO discusses technology's role in world

Texas Instruments (TI) CEO Rich Templeton was on Tech campus Wednesday to deliver this year's James R. Carreker Distinguished Chair Lecture. The lecture was held in the Van Leer auditorium, which was filled beyond seating capacity with Tech students, faculty, and others.

Templeton was named CEO of the electronics company in May of 2004 and has been with the company since entering directly after his 1980 graduation from Union College in N.Y. with a degree in Electrical Engineering.

He had many things to say about Tech, speaking of the relationship the two entities have shared over the years. According to Templeton, over 150 TI employees are Tech graduates and over 40 current students are co-oping or interning with the company.

"We've got 20 years of history together going back to a lot of original DSP (digital signal processing) work. Over the years it's been combinations of the investments we've made at Tech funding research and development and making sure work gets done in DSP or analog technology," Templeton said.

TI is known to the American public for the calculators it produces and when Templeton quizzed the audience for what TI was most often associated with, they immediately affirmed that.

Templeton used the example of calculators for how TI promotes itself as a company: not via ad campaigns which, according to Templeton, do a poor job of actually convincing the viewer that a company is doing great things.

He spoke of the nature of an engineering education in the modern economy, especially targeting those in the audience who were in the process of getting one and might be having a hard time with it.

"If I can leave you with one message to take home, it's to think of engineering as being knowledge and capability as opposed to being an occupation," Templeton said.

The audience in the building, which is host to the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, contained future inventors and developers, but, according to Templeton, there would also be attorneys, salesmen, and others who would need to rely on a solid background in engineering to achieve great things.

According to Templeton, the modern economy would include many people and countries who were in the past uninvolved with the progression of technology. The diversity of the audience in attendance was similar to the diversity that one would see in the TI lunch room and that of the TI customer base. Whereas the primary producers and consumers of electronics were formerly found in the US, western Europe, and a few nations in Asia that market is undergoing expanding tremendous expansion.

Templeton said that diversity and the inability to forecast exactly what's going to happen next makes engineering such an exciting field to work in.

"[As an engineer,] you'll never get bored, but you may get jet-lagged," Templeton said.

Templeton spoke of the new frontiers in the future of electronics. Though he said it is nearly impossible to accurately forecast such things, he said that television via cell phones would take off in the near future and that it would become the primary way that people watch video content, replacing the conventional television.

He also talked about great developments to be made in nanotechnology and future biological and medical applications of technology such as non-invasive patient monitoring and replacing lost limbs with prosthetics.

According to Templeton, the work that needs to be done domestically is promoting American K-12 education in the math and sciences.

All of the modern electronics that are now part of our daily life had their roots in basic research done 25-30 years ago and likewise the developments of the future will have as part of their beginnings research done today.

According to Templeton, America needs to pay special attention to getting children interested in math instead of afraid of it in order to maintain what he called the best research and education system in the world, and of which he cited Tech as "a terrific example."