Sanjai Kohli:
The force behind the popularity of GPS
Kohli finished his engineering degree from IIT Bombay in 1979 and then went to the US to do his Masters. He then worked in a couple of aerospace companies and was assigned to put intelligence into bombs dropped from planes so that they would hit the intended targets. As of this, he worked on a guided GPS system for the US army and soon all the US military weapons were based on that technology.
He then applied the technology in commercial applications and so setup the company called SiRF. He reinvented the signal processing physics to reduce the cost, size and power,resulting in tens of thousands of dollars of signal processing/communication equipment to reside in a single silicon chip. The chip was 200 times more capable than those already in use, was able to get the signal within 100 ms and was available at a fraction of the cost. By 2006, 80% of GPS devices ran on SiRF chips.
At its peak SiRF had a market capitalization of $3 billion. Towards the end of the 1990s, Kohli left SiRF and founded WirelessHome, a company into last mile connectivity using unlicensed spectrum. In 2004, Kohli founded TruSpan, a mobile video company that had most of its operations in Bangalore and which he sold to SiRF two years later.
Kohli has been short-listed for the European Inventor Award 2010, instituted by the European Patent Office and the European Commission. He’s one out of the total of 12 short-listed, and one among three short-listed in the category of inventors from non-European countries.
His message : “Don’t be afraid to dream about doing what may be termed as the impossible. It’s possible, and there will be many, many people, who will tell you that it can’t be done but you have to believe in you and your team’s abilities.”
Source: Times of India
No comments:
Post a Comment