Team Sampada: Could you please introduce yourself to our readers
MJN: My name is M.J. Narasimha. I obtained my B. E. degree in Electrical Engineering from UVCE in 1971. I joined the Indian Institute of Science the same year for an M.E. program, but after one semester I secured a Govt. of India Scholarship for studying abroad and left for higher studies in the USA. I completed the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees, both in Electrical Engineering, from Stanford University in 1976. My Ph.D. dissertation was in Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and two eminent Stanford professors (Prof. Allen Peterson and Prof. Thomas Kailath) served as my thesis advisors. After completing my education, I worked at various hi-tech companies in the Silicon Valley, and currently, I am a Senior Director of Engineering at Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, California, and also an Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. I was awarded the IEEE highest honor (Fellow grade) in the year 2000 for my work on Discrete Cosine Transform Algorithms and Transmultiplexers. I am currently a Life Fellow of the IEEE.
TS: What are your most fond memories of your time at UVCE? Can you please share some of the faculty members’ related details?
MJN: The five-year B.E. course at UVCE was rather long and tedious. The first three years were common to all the branches and we forked out to our electives in the last two. I don’t remember much of what I learned in the first three years. I had lots of difficulty with certain workshops like carpentry, smithy etc. during this time. Surveying was fun—particularly because of the “broken English phrases” of our teacher Mr. Rangappa. I opted for Electrical Engineering instead of the newly introduced Electronics in the fourth year since I thought there were more faculty members that could teach that subject. Prof G. Parameshwarappa (GP) ran the Electrical Engineering department with a lot of enthusiasm and was very happy that opted for his department instead of Electronics.
TS: We would like to hear more about your experience as Adjunct Professor at Stanford University for more than 35 years. Could you give us some details?
MJN: Soon after finishing my Ph.D. at Stanford in 1976, I was given the opportunity to teach certain courses there as a guest lecturer and was later promoted to Adjunct Professor in 1986. As an Adjunct Professor, I developed a new academic program in the Telecommunications area by introducing two new courses into the Stanford curriculum (Digital Transmission Systems in Telecommunications and Digital Switching Systems in Telecommunications) and taught these courses for many years. During that time, I also guided many Ph.D. students as an associate dissertation advisor and served as a Ph.D. orals committee examiner–which I still continue to do.
TS: Our readers would like to know about your journey at Qualcomm and Intel in the past 40+ years.
MJN: I served as a Senior Director of Technology/Engineering for eleven years in the Modem Systems group at Qualcomm, Santa Clara, CA, where I was involved in the design of 3G/4G/5G cellular modem technologies for mobile phones (UE). I am currently a Senior Director of Engineering at Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA, responsible for the development of 5G/6G Base Station modem algorithms on a Vector Processing Engine (VPE).
TS: What suggestions would you like to give to UVCE and especially the alumni community to take it to the next league?
MJN: Academic excellence is a must to survive in the current highly competitive global environment. We also need to be aware of the expanding technological advances and be willing to learn (and adapt swiftly) to the inevitable changes. Those who cling to old dogmas and resist changes won’t persist for long. I have re-invented may times in my technical career.
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