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.

Atmosic ultra-low-power Bluetooth ICs are part of innovative award-winning products. Image used courtesy of Atmosic

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 Su 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.

Meet David Su

David Su co-founded Atmosic Technologies in 2016 and currently serves as its CEO. He has over 30 years of engineering and wireless system design experience and has worked on RF designs that have been used in billions of devices worldwide.

David began his career as a design engineer at Hewlett-Packard and later joined startup Atheros. After Atheros was acquired by Qualcomm in 2011, he served as the VP of Engineering. He has also served as a Consulting Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford.

David received his BS and MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tennessee and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, where his research focused on IC design. He has multiple patents in the areas of IC design, analog circuits, and RF communications.