“If you have passion and commitment, you can accomplish whatever you desire,” says Padmini Sampath, Design Manager and Management Representative of Quality in Texas Instruments (TI). If you have the will to succeed, nothing is impossible. This never-say-die attitude is probably what has seen her through her career in engineering.

In her career spanning over 15 years, Padmini has been involved in the design of complex chips and systems. She has been involved in the design and verification of DSP cores as also the design management of microcontroller chips and control IPs that have a direct impact on the society, enabling industrial control and green energy, amongst numerous other applications.

At a time when not many women ventured into the engineering field, Padmini took up a bachelor’s course in electronics and communications engineering and graduated from the Government College of Technology, Coimbatore in 1989. In fact, like all others in those days, her parents wanted her to pursue a course in Arts.

The fact that not too many women make a foray into the semiconductor industry did not deter Padmini when, after having worked for close to 10 years in two different companies in Chennai and Mumbai, she made the decision to move to Texas Instruments (TI) as a design engineer in 2000. This was the turning point of her career.

When Padmini joined TI, the company had just come out with the first Digital Signal Processor (DSP) codenamed ‘Ankoor’, which had been designed and developed wholly in India. She joined the design team of ‘Mantra’, another DSP intended for control applications, as a verification engineer. From then onwards, Padmini went on to design many products, which have a direct impact on society. She has also contributed towards the definition of SoC design processes and quality objectives and metrics in TI India.