Today, the technology innovation is being driven more by the needs of consumers including what is needed in a so called "connected home". There are a couple of things that are very much needed now. A couple of examples of these are,

•Guaranteed ultra-high speed broadband connections coming into homes. There is a need for high bandwidth in the upstream direction. Current solutions don’t satisfy this growing demand.
•Distribution of high speed bandwidth to enable simultaneous multi-screen HD, 4K or 8K experience

On enterprise/infrastructure side, one of the big unsolved problem is backhaul for Pico cells for ubiquitous high bandwidth 4G/LTE coverage. LTE promises ultra-high speed wireless connections. However the availability of high speed can only be guaranteed if a Pico cell is nearby. In order to provide ubiquitous coverage these must be placed densely, e.g. every ~250m or so! However these cells must be fed by high speed links which do not exist today!

Thinking Out of the Box

I always encourage and challenge people to think out of the box and find a number different ways to solve a challenging technical problem. Often I or my direct staff would get involved and participate in the process. Sometimes I ask people to solve a challenging technical problem, while I myself and or my staff spend time solving the same problem. We typically compare the different solutions and then pick the one that serves best serves our needs.

I value intellectual property. So I encourage people in the company to bring forth if they have "new idea" be it for developing something entirely new or to improve upon something that we have done in the past or even something that is "essential" but no one has thought about or documented in the past. I always emphasize the strategic areas of interest for the company as far as intellectual property is concerned. If it is novel (determined by either me or my staff of the "invention review committee"), we encourage folks to go ahead with filing a provisional patent. We then take these through our process for filing utility patents, foreign filing etc. We also recognize our folks for filing patents and also when the patent is granted in various ways. This motivates people to think out of the box, invent and generate intellectual property that is valuable for us.

Lack of Availability for Resources

CTO organizations need to not only just come up with an idea or just do some MATLAB simulations along with Power point presentations, but in order to create technology and successfully transfer it into the hands of engineering, CTO Offices must also do what I called "advanced development", "architecture development" and prototyping including developing hardware platforms using FPGA and/or test chips. This is something I have learned and carried over from my days at AT&T Bell Laboratories during its hay days. The silicon valley model of breakdown of responsibilities between CTO and Engineering does not allow companies to create new technologies. It only works for startups and not for mid to larger companies. Hence Mid to large companies often buy startups to acquire technologies instead of developing them. As the CTO of a small technology company, which is NOT a startup, it is always a challenge to get enough engineering resource allocated to do this.

In our industry the above methodology of buying startups for acquiring technologies does not particularly work well anymore! Companies need to develop them. I have successfully done this at Ikanos by appropriately partnering with engineering by creating and leading strategic technology development projects, where the CTO office works with a team of engineers (borrowed from the engineering organization) assigned to the project for the duration of the project (between 9 – 18 months) after the initial science risk has been taken out by the initial work done by the CTO staff. Once the prototyping is completed and technology is proven, I transfer back the whole team to engineering to continue and complete the product development.

Changing the Complexion of the Industry

There are a few things that in two major trends set to change the complexion of the industry in the near future. The first of which is ultra high speed broadband technologies that provide up to 1 Gbps bandwidth to home e.g. G.fast, Fiber to the home that not only provide high speed download speeds but also high speed upload, which is becoming increasingly more relevant in the so called "cloud" era. Everyone will not only be streaming multiple HD or 4k or 8K content simultaneously on top of normal voice and data traffic, but will also be uploading files, video, songs, photos etc. to the cloud. There will also be a demand for online interactive real time HD games over the net!

The second is the Internet of things (IOT). These are devices that communicate with one another and with the cloud. They either use a wireless broadband connection or a combination of wireless and wireline broadband and/or LAN connections starting from a "smart energy meter" or a "smart refrigerator" or a wearable such as a health monitoring and reporting device like a "fit bit" or the famous "Google Glass"!

(As told to Durgesh Prakash)