Dr. Ahmad Bahai on the Semiconductor Race Behind AI and Robotics

Ahmad Bahai (0:00)

I believe that there is no other technology in human history as creative and as innovative as semiconductor.

Sometimes scientists say that, okay, here is the limit, you cannot go beyond that limit because it's built on some physics law. And it's amazing how often I've seen engineers surprise scientists to find a way to go around that.

Brian Heater (0:21)

As I started covering AI and robotics, one of the things that's very interesting to hear, very technical, people talk about things like magic. You've got the people who are working on them that are completely surprised that they work the way they do.

Ahmad Bahai (0:36)

10, 15 years ago, there was a very famous physicist who said, okay, you cannot go below 55 nanometers. And guess what? We are now at 2 nanometers today.

Brian Heater (0:45)

In the past 10 to 15 years, what, if anything, has the company been doing to prepare itself for this moment?

Ahmad Bahai (0:52)

Nobody can predict the next market in 10 years. But what you can see that the trends are very clearly there. For example, now that we have these massive data centers, one of the bottlenecks is how to deliver power to these giant chips. Demand for power from portable devices all the way to data center is insatiable.

Brian Heater (1:11)

Is there a way to have more and more and more compute demands to see that this is going to be more and more research intensive, to see that at some point just not get more doom and gloom about it?

Hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of Automated. I'm Brian Heater, the managing editor at the Association for Advancing Automation. Big guest this week, we are speaking with the Texas Instruments Chief Technology Officer, Ahmad Bahai. We'll dig into his backstory, TI's rich history, and how the chip maker is working to remain competitive in the era of physical AI. Thanks to Ahmad, and thanks to you as always for tuning in. If you've been enjoying the podcast, the easiest way to support us is by liking, subscribing, telling a friend. I would also encourage that you check out our newsletter of the same name. You can find that over at automated.fm. For now, stick around and enjoy this conversation with Ahmad Bahai.

The Bell Labs is one of those legendary places. You were there for a minute. I'm very curious what it was like in the 90s.

Ahmad Bahai (2:27)

Yeah. Hello, Brian. Yeah, absolutely. It was quite an experience as a fresh graduate PhD student.

Going to Bell Labs was being in the most exciting research institute in the world.

In fact, when I finished my PhD, I was thinking about should I go to academia, to industry or go to Bell Labs. And I was at some point convinced that Bell Labs is the place because you walk in the place and you see the giants that you really know them from the textbooks that they wrote for and a Nobel Prize that they won and all the presents they had in the entire industry. So I was fortunate enough that when I joined Bell Labs, I worked with one of the Nobel laureates that is Bell Labs. Bell Labs had more Nobel laureates than almost every university out there. So that kind of mentorship for a fresh graduate was quite an exciting experience. I don't think there is any place like that anymore in the world with the concentration of talent and the freedom of exploration because of the unique situation of Bell Labs. Pretty much as long as you can convince your technical leader that the topic is worthy of doing research, you have a chance to work on it. And that could range from theoretical physics, material science, electronics, information theory and everything in between. And that environment was very stimulating, very inspiring and very important. And I really enjoyed the time. I was there for four or five years and that was an amazing experience that really built a foundation for everything that I did since then.

Brian Heater (4:07)

What was the focus that you ultimately settled on?

Ahmad Bahai (4:10)

So originally, I started with wireless communication and satellite communication. So I worked on very early stage of Wi-Fi concept back in the 90s. And interestingly, after two years, three years there, I wrote a book on the topic of multi-carrier OFDM systems, which is really the foundation for Wi-Fi and 5G and LTEs and a lot of other technologies. And working with people who pretty much started the field of communication many decades back was such an amazing experience to work with them, understand some of the learnings that they had, some of the insights that they can share with you. So yeah, I worked on wireless systems. I remember working on some of the early advanced base stations and some of the technologies for wireless local area network, what you call it Wi-Fi today. So that was the, and also on devices, like power amplifiers and new materials that can offer higher performance in wireless communications. It was kind of a mix of system, device and circuits that was really unique to have.