Date: Monday, October 4, 2021

Time: 12:30pm-1:20pm

Location: Van Leer C241

Speaker: Roland Sperlich

Speaker's Title: VP, General Manager

Speaker’s Affiliation: Texas Instruments (Dallas, Texas)

Seminar Title: Building a Fulfilling Career in Semiconductors

Abstract of Talk: Roland will share his experiences and advice for building a fulfilling career starting with landing his first real job through the graduate coop program at Georgia Tech, working as an applications engineer, systems engineering lead, leading several worldwide teams, running over $1.5B/year business and being elected a Vice President at Texas Instruments. Roland will highlight the different opportunities for engineers in the semiconductor industry, as well as some of his lessons learned with the desire that some of these will benefit students who are embarking on the next step of their career.

Biographical Sketch of the Speaker:

Roland Sperlich is vice president and general manager of the Interface business unit at Texas Instruments. He joined TI in 2005. In his current role, he leads a team that covers Logic and Voltage Translation Devices, MUXes and Protection Devices, Isolation Products, and Transceivers. These products address a growing TAM of over $5B in annual revenue.  

Roland has been part of the Interface business since 2010, when he became product line manager for High Speed Interface. In this role, he led the team to develop a differentiated analog portfolio of signal conditioners including the industry’s highest performance passive switches, the first USB2.0 redriver and TI’s first DP/HDMI retimer portfolio. The team also qualified and made inroads with a large portfolio of USB interface products for automotive infotainment systems.

In 2015, Roland assumed responsibility for the Transceiver product line where he was responsible for all TI transceiver products, including those supporting RS-485/232, I2C, CAN/LIN and System Basis Chips (SBC). Under his leadership, the product line grew by 30% and was able to enter the competitive CAN/LIN and SBC marketplace.   

Roland received his bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from Merrimack College, his master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, and an MBA from Southern Methodist University. He holds several patents and has published articles on the application of equalization and linearization techniques in the field of communications and high-speed interface.

In his free time, Roland enjoys playing ice-hockey, watersports and playing violin with his daughter and son.