Connecting the Dots: NXP's Smart Solutions to Support Daily Life

Ron Martino, Executive Vice President at NXP Semiconductors, discusses the future of edge computing and creating technological solutions that improve daily life. Explore how advanced digital tools meet human needs, paving the way for a smarter and more connected future. 🏡

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Transcript

(0:00) 

Welcome to the Tomorrow's World Today podcast.

 (0:04) 

We sit down with experts, world-changing innovators, creators, and makers to explore how they're taking action to make tomorrow's world a better place for technology, science, innovation, sustainability, the arts, and more.

 (0:21) 

And now, this week's episode.

(0:25) 

In this episode of the Tomorrow's World Today podcast, George Davison, who is also the host of Tomorrow's World Today on Science, interviews Ron Martino, who is the Executive Vice President and Chief Sales Officer at NXP, a semiconductor company that designs technologies to improve people's lives.

 (0:40) 

Ron discusses the ongoing nature of innovation and the inspirational vision for the future of technology, specifically in the context of edge computing, which will enable more devices to operate intelligently and independently.

 (0:51) 

He also reflects on the importance of understanding customer needs and translating them into valuable solutions connecting technology to real-world applications that have positive societal impacts.

(1:01) 

Now, here's George.

 (1:02) 

Welcome, Ron.

(1:03) 

Great to be here, George.

 (1:05) 

I'm excited to be at Inventionland.

 (1:07) 

Well, we're excited to have you here.

(1:09) 

And to share some of your background and maybe some of our people out there would like to hear a little bit about how you got to where you are in the world today.

 (1:19) 

Sounds good.

 (1:20) 

I'm happy to talk about that.

(1:22) 

So I went to school for engineering and graduated and started looking for a job.

 (1:29) 

And I found that the semiconductor industry created really cool technologies and capabilities using very small structures.

 (1:41) 

So you take the width of a human hair and you divide it by a thousand pieces, and one of those pieces is the size of the devices that we create.

(1:53) 

And so that intrigued me.

 (1:54) 

And I started in the world of semiconductors back in the 80s.

 (1:58) 

In the 80s?

(1:59) 

Yes.

 (2:00) 

So when you first heard about this fraction of a fraction of a hair, how did that information come to you?

 (2:08) 

How did you become aware of that?

(2:09) 

So it was an interview.

 (2:11) 

I studied chemical engineering as an undergrad and then device physics and material science for my advanced degrees.

 (2:20) 

And when I started to interview, I had a question of why at that time, IBM, why were you hiring chemical engineers for semiconductors?

(2:30) 

And someone explained it.

 (2:31) 

And instead of scaling things up and making them larger, we got to scale things smaller and pack more things into a small area that then became useful devices like your cell phone, like your thermostat, like your car in terms of the electronics that go into it.

 (2:52) 

So it became a very interesting twist on my education, and it got my creative juices flowing in terms of what I could do in that by making things smaller.

(3:03) 

Interesting.

 (3:04) 

If you were now the person who you were talking to when you were younger, what would you say that the future looks like?

 (3:12) 

What is the future of your industry?

(3:16) 

If we're already at a fraction of a fraction of a hair, what's next?

 (3:20) 

Well, let's just briefly talk about NXP semiconductors.

 (3:24) 

So we create electronics using semiconductor technology that goes into cars.

(3:31) 

It goes into smart homes and smart factories.

 (3:35) 

It's part of a secure wallet that you have on your cell phone, the mobile wallet.

 (3:40) 

And it's creating all of these capabilities that you use around you every day and making them better.

(3:48) 

And it's helping improve the safety of you and your family.

 (3:52) 

It's improving your efficiency, whether it's how much energy you use or productivity.

 (3:57) 

It saves you money in terms of how you operate your home or what you do in businesses.

(4:03) 

And so the future of what we do and then how to succeed in that is all around finding meaningful solutions or tasks in your life that you can solve in terms of problem solving.

 (4:17) 

Yes.

 (4:18) 

So could you go into a little background as to, I mean, semiconductors weren't always that small.

(4:24) 

But basically, could you go into what is the job that they perform for us?

 (4:29) 

OK.

 (4:30) 

So think of a semiconductor as a material and you have a wire that's conductive for electricity and you have insulators that protect you from the flow of electrical current.

(4:42) 

A semiconductor has the properties of both.

 (4:44) 

You can switch it between a conductive condition or a insulating condition.

 (4:51) 

And by using that material, you can create electronic circuits, switches, wires, capacitors, resistors, and pack those in a very small space and create the electric circuits that you see around you in your everyday life.

(5:07) 

So focused on developing those requires a whole set of engineering skills as well as business skills in order to create the capability and then develop products around that capability that go into your car or go into your home.

 (5:25) 

Makes a lot of sense.

 (5:27) 

So semiconductors are in all these different industries.

(5:31) 

So can you walk me back a little bit with NXP semiconductors?

 (5:37) 

How did the company get formed?

 (5:39) 

Sure.

(5:40) 

So NXP was founded in 2006.

 (5:44) 

It was a spinoff of the semiconductor division of Philips.

 (5:49) 

And then later in 2015, it was merged with the Motorola semiconductor division, which was called Freescale.

(5:59) 

And it's now the company that we have today, which is over 30,000 employees.

 (6:05) 

And we have facilities for both manufacturing and the designing of these electronics around the world, including factories that we have in the U.S., both in Texas and in Arizona.

 (6:20) 

So it's a very exciting company focused on innovation and applying technology built off of semiconductors to automotive business as well as industrial and IOT.

(6:33) 

And then two other areas we focus on is a combination of secure payment and mobile wallets in cell phones, as well as communication, sending data from one point to another.

 (6:49) 

I was hoping that you could tell us a little bit about your title.

 (6:54) 

You are the executive vice president of global sales.

(6:57) 

That's correct.

 (6:57) 

But you're also very informed in the field of, let's say, the technology behind semiconductors.

 (7:07) 

So sometimes in my profession, I'm around some people that are very tech-oriented, and yet they're not too outside in that world of sales.

(7:19) 

They're not the best communicators.

 (7:21) 

We refer to that as storytelling.

 (7:23) 

So you can be a great inventor, but if you can't tell that story.

(7:27) 

So tell us a little bit about your profession, if you would, and what that title means and how you transported yourself along the way.

 (7:35) 

Sure.

 (7:36) 

Yeah, no, it's an exciting story.

(7:38) 

And I'm very passionate about what I do.

 (7:42) 

I started out as an engineer.

 (7:44) 

I spent years doing engineering work and then quickly found myself attracted to management.

(7:51) 

How to drive decisions of a business and technologists to create capability that was meaningful or impactful.

 (8:00) 

That led me to going from engineering management and running large R&D organizations to running full businesses.

 (8:09) 

And I've had the opportunity in two companies and 15 years with NXP to run large businesses around embedded compute.

(8:17) 

So a lot of my focus throughout my career is all about creating small embedded computers that go in everything around you.

 (8:24) 

And then running businesses.

 (8:26) 

In both of those engineering roles, as well as business roles, it's always about the customer.

(8:32) 

It's always connecting with people.

 (8:35) 

It's communicating with your team members and collaborating.

 (8:38) 

And it's getting to understand what the problems that our customers are trying to solve, understanding them, and then translating that into an offering that has value to them.

(8:49) 

And so that connection from technology to people has always been there in my career.

 (8:53) 

So naturally going from R&D focused on let me talk to customers to running a business, let me talk to customers, to now I am responsible for the global sales of NXP.

 (9:07) 

And I get to fly around the world and interact with many, many interesting companies developing products using semiconductor technology.

(9:18) 

And I get to link from the device level all the way to an end application and relate it to what it does that's meaningful for your life.

 (9:26) 

So talking with customers, identifying their needs and helping them solve their problems.

 (9:31) 

That's correct.

(9:32) 

And you never once brought up the word make lots of money.

 (9:36) 

So would you say you are more fulfilled at solving challenges for the, you know, let's say the human race, make a better life for people than you are at chasing money?

 (9:46) 

I would say we are pursuing success in our business and leadership in our business and pursuing it where you have a passion.

(9:56) 

And in the end, that leads to many forms of success.

 (10:00) 

Obviously, our investors want us to be successful financially, and we have an obligation to deliver on the commitments of people investing money in us and then translating that to growth and profit for the investors and owners of the company.

 (10:16) 

But what's more exciting is we get to do that in a way where we're having a positive impact on society.

(10:24) 

As I mentioned, safety.

 (10:26) 

We save lives.

 (10:27) 

We make the world greener by being more energy efficient.

(10:32) 

We help your productivity.

 (10:34) 

We can save agricultural or livestock related businesses.

 (10:41) 

We can help them have healthier products, healthier livestock, healthier crops by applying technology.

(10:49) 

So by finding those problems and solving it using the semiconductor technology, it's very rewarding.

 (10:56) 

And of course, you're trying to find what's interesting to the end user in the end.

Speaker 2

(11:02) 

Yes.

Speaker 1

(11:02) 

Take a smart home.

 (11:03) 

I have a niece who once said to me, I don't want your technology in my home.

 (11:08) 

And I said, well, why?

(11:09) 

She goes, well, what happens if it breaks?

 (11:12) 

What am I going to do?

 (11:12) 

I'd rather just walk up and turn on a light switch.

(11:15) 

And I said, but what if I can make your family safer?

 (11:17) 

What if I can cut your electric bill in half?

 (11:20) 

Are you interested?

(11:20) 

Well, of course.

 (11:21) 

But make it easy to use and easy to fix.

 (11:23) 

And so get to pursue addressing what's truly meaningful in terms of you adopting technology and then have it do something meaningful where you want it.

(11:34) 

And then that leads to success in all fronts.

 (11:36) 

It leads to financial success.

 (11:38) 

It leads to personal success in terms of achieving goals that you're proud of.

(11:44) 

So I would say we are successful in many different aspects of what we do.

 (11:49) 

Well, Ron, you've been blessed.

 (11:50) 

You've been able to find something you like to do.

(11:52) 

And it's bringing good to the world.

 (11:55) 

Let's see here.

 (11:56) 

Did you have any hobbies growing up?

(11:59) 

Sure.

 (12:00) 

So there's the competitive side.

 (12:02) 

I would be lying to you if I didn't tell you I was very competitive.

(12:07) 

I'm the youngest of five boys and I liked various sports.

 (12:11) 

And in those sports, it was always about winning, winning, winning.

 (12:16) 

Build your skills, get better, win, win, win.

(12:19) 

And that kind of carries over into university where when I was in high school, I found out people can say no to me if I didn't really push and have the best grades.

 (12:32) 

And that's something that I didn't like.

 (12:36) 

So going into the university, it was a focus and a passion on being very successful so that people didn't say no to me and I had a choice.

(12:47) 

That's interesting.

 (12:47) 

So you recognize that if you didn't have the best grades, you didn't get as much say-so or your voice or your ideas didn't carry as much weight.

 (12:57) 

Is that what I just heard you say?

(12:59) 

That's right.

 (13:00) 

And then different doors would open up as opposed to having more options and choice.

 (13:07) 

But having more choices gives you a much bigger space to explore and more opportunities that will be placed in front of you.

(13:15) 

All right.

 (13:16) 

Then let's take a look into the future, let's say 15 years, maybe 50 years out.

 (13:22) 

What are we seeing from your perspective and your industry, whatever your insights are, where do you think we're going?

(13:30) 

So let's just quickly talk about the past.

 (13:34) 

Personal computers, cell phones.

 (13:37) 

People didn't understand just prior to those coming out how impactful they would be on your lives.

(13:45) 

And now every day you have some form of a computer, whether it's a tablet or a PC, and you spend a significant amount of time on your cell phone doing all kinds of things.

 (13:55) 

So as we look at the next couple decades, we call that the age of edge computing.

 (14:02) 

And that's the idea that many more devices around you will have intelligence, ability to compute, ability to understand the environment, and then act independently of a human instructing it to do something and do something that's consistent with your desire.

(14:21) 

So automation.

 (14:24) 

And more and more devices will be created that will have that ability to do things in an intelligent way.

 (14:33) 

They call it artificial intelligence in forms that are very practical and meaningful.

(14:39) 

And that will help people extend quality of life for aging family members.

 (14:44) 

It will address things like mobility, where I have parents that are in their 90s.

 (14:50) 

Their ability to go to one place or another place has certain limitations, or they may have more challenges going up and down stairs.

(15:00) 

Well technology can solve that.

 (15:02) 

Technology can give someone a greater freedom in terms of their mobility.

 (15:08) 

It can also help their health and wellness.

(15:11) 

It can give a much more accurate and complete understanding of your physical condition.

 (15:17) 

So instead of making a discrete measurement of your blood pressure or different biometrics, you can have continuous monitoring.

 (15:24) 

And then you can give that to a doctor of your choice when you want to, and they can see a complete history and make more accurate analysis of your health and what you should do in order to improve your health.

(15:37) 

So I see technology becoming more prolific in your life, but in a way that is meaningful to solve problems and to make life better from a quality of life perspective.

 (15:50) 

So there's a lot yet to do, is what I'm hearing you say.

 (15:54) 

Technology never ends and there's always innovation.

(15:58) 

When you go back in time and you look at the different phases of innovation and what's been created, and what visionaries have thought, and now what we have today.

 (16:09) 

Today we have the communication devices and we have the automated machines that are doing things that were just science fiction of the past.

 (16:21) 

Yeah, I remember I used to run home so I could see certain shows when I was younger, like Star Trek and things of that nature.

(16:28) 

They were so inspirational.

 (16:31) 

So it's fun to think about where it's all going to go.

 (16:33) 

I think life is going to get a lot easier, specifically as you're mentioning the elders in our lives.

(16:40) 

They struggle so much that that's a good noble cause if you can help to improve their lives.

 (16:47) 

Alright, so in the world of let's say innovation and invention, we refer to the very beginning of that process as the world of inspiration.

 (17:02) 

I'm curious to hear, at least from your perspective, what inspires you?

(17:09) 

Other than you found what you like, does nature inspire you?

 (17:14) 

Does that release your energy before you go back into the math or back into the harder work?

 (17:20) 

How do you, like here we refer to it as when we get too tight, we can't be as creative, we're not thinking of solutions the way we're supposed to, and it's like the brain is so tight you can't get anything out.

(17:31) 

And then we train our people that, hey, it's time to release.

 (17:35) 

And everybody's different.

 (17:37) 

I'm just curious as to what might be that for you.

(17:40) 

Sure.

 (17:40) 

Well, in terms of outlets to expand my thinking or just relax, music and golf.

 (17:52) 

Ah, really?

(17:53) 

And both are very interesting because they stretch your mind or take your mind in very different places.

 (18:02) 

Music is sound, and I'm going to take you both on the tech side of it as well as the artistic side of it.

 (18:11) 

Sound can be used in life in many ways.

(18:15) 

It can relax you.

 (18:16) 

It can help you sleep better, which is a way to relieve stress and have a healthier life.

 (18:25) 

It can inspire you in terms of creativity and how your mind is thinking and functioning.

(18:33) 

And it can be used in very creative ways with some of the technology that we're working on where you can be immersed in sound.

 (18:41) 

And now there's the idea of sound objects where you can place sound objects in a three-dimensional space.

 (18:47) 

So immerse you with different pieces of sound in many different ways that artists in the industry are now leveraging to give you a different experience with their musical composition.

(18:59) 

As well as theater where you give surround sound, but that's being taken to yet another level of the use of sound to influence your life.

 (19:09) 

So that's one.

 (19:10) 

And then I mentioned golf.

(19:12) 

Golf is the opposite of everything I've been trained to believe is correct.

 (19:16) 

You have to hit down for the ball to go up.

 (19:19) 

You need to swing easier for the ball to go a further distance.

(19:23) 

You need to think less in order to play well.

 (19:26) 

And when you start to address both the mental and the physical challenge of that game and realize that your mind can be the biggest deterrent for your success, it becomes a very interesting combination of how you find a calm, relaxed place in order to be successful at the task or the game that you're playing.

 (19:52) 

So between those two, those are where I find either relaxation or a place to have my mind go into places that aren't typical on a daily work day.

(20:05) 

Thank you for that.

 (20:06) 

That's very helpful.

 (20:08) 

We refer to the world of creation as traditional arts.

(20:11) 

Do you do any traditional arts at all?

 (20:14) 

Well, back when I was in the university, I was involved with a performing arts group involved with dance.

 (20:22) 

And that was an expression of ideas and feelings by using three-dimensional space with light, sound, and motion.

(20:32) 

So it was actually very complementary to engineering in ways that most people wouldn't understand.

 (20:40) 

But in engineering, you're very good at seeing things in a three-dimensional way and using different content in order to create your end product.

 (20:51) 

So from a performing arts point of view, I've had that exposure through my education, and that's helped creative thought and how I think and how I can relate technology, but look at it from a different perspective using a different portion of my brain.

(21:08) 

The way you've described it, is it almost like a stepping stone where from the world of creation and art and dance and music, that combination, does it apply in the world of innovation and R&D?

 (21:24) 

Has it translated at all to help you from early life to where you are now?

 (21:29) 

So I truly believe it does.

(21:31) 

It does in many different ways.

 (21:34) 

As I mentioned earlier, you're stronger when you're working with people that have different ways to think diversity.

 (21:40) 

And the better you can collaborate with different individuals, the more perspectives you have on approaching a problem and solving it or coming up with creative ideas and testing how that idea will be impactful.

(21:55) 

So having and exercising your brain both in an artistic way as well as in a scientific way just extends your ability to think and to look at things in different ways.

 (22:09) 

So they're very much complementary in my opinion and they lead to a great deal of creativity.

 (22:17) 

Even on how you, in terms of a sales role, how you bring the message of what technology can do to make your life better, safer and more secure.

(22:29) 

It's all about presenting information to people who have familiarity or have no understanding of what we do and presenting it in a way that they can relate.

 (22:41) 

And that involves communication skills, that involves a way of expression that people can then take in and understand.

 (22:50) 

And that requires that you can understand people from different backgrounds and different ways of thinking.

(22:57) 

So once we've gotten inspired and that world of creativity starts to kick in, innovation then comes, you can expand that out into the field of innovation.

 (23:09) 

Does any of that eventually work its way into scale in production, in the world of production?

 (23:16) 

Can you translate any of that eventually to that world?

(23:19) 

Well let me answer it this way, see if I'm addressing your question.

 (23:23) 

In Austin, Texas, we've created a smart home innovation lab.

 (23:29) 

And why did we create that?

(23:30) 

We created that so that our engineers who are developing semiconductors can understand the true end application and environment.

 (23:40) 

And all the devices that contain NXP semiconductors that are working in that environment, they need to understand how they work.

 (23:48) 

Do they work well?

(23:50) 

Do they frustrate you?

 (23:51) 

How can we change our products in order to make that end environment more successful, easier to use, easier to fix?

 (24:03) 

So immersing someone into an environment where you have to become more creative on tying something on a result, a condition of your home that you wouldn't normally think about when you're developing a semiconductor product, you now get to link that end result to, is there something I can do at a semiconductor level that's going to be beneficial?

(24:27) 

And that could be energy efficiency.

 (24:29) 

How do I make the world greener or how do I save you money on your electric bill?

 (24:33) 

How do I perform a task in a way that's more efficient?

(24:35) 

Because that has a meaningful difference in my end home to my cost of operating my home or my business.

 (24:44) 

And the more you can immerse yourself into the end application and then bring it back to the product that you're developing, which in our cases is semiconductor products or electronics, the better off that you're going to do to come up with meaningful capability.

 (25:01) 

So you're going to identify what that specific semiconductor is and you're going to have to figure out scale, at scale, is it going to be priced properly?

(25:12) 

Can you get the right raw materials?

 (25:14) 

And can you forge them in some way to create an end product, right?

 (25:20) 

So in the world of production, does anything translate from that, how does that translation from the initial identifying of the challenge, coming up with the solutions, building prototypes, having human beings experience that, give feedback, but eventually somebody has to boil this stuff down and get to something that can be mass produced at a price point that markets can bear.

(25:46) 

So does anything translate to help you get to that world of production that you can think of?

 (25:53) 

So semiconductor business is something that more people have knowledge about today because of what we've gone through in the past two years.

 (26:04) 

And it's all about large-scale production to develop the electronics that you find everywhere in your life.

(26:12) 

And when you don't have them, you see what the impact is.

 (26:16) 

So everything translates to creating that large-scale manufacturing capacity to enable your cars to work, to enable your phones to work, to enable your home to operate and for your business to run.

 (26:30) 

So in doing that, you have to think many years ahead because the time of developing a product and a new technology that brings more cost efficiency to you as a consumer is the history of semiconductors.

(26:47) 

Moore's law, continuously scaling things to smaller dimensions so you can fit more capability into a small area and continue to make it more cost effective.

 (27:00) 

That is the history of semiconductors.

 (27:02) 

Now translating that to an efficient operation where every penny matters in terms of producing

 (27:10) 

that product so you can price it and cost it in a competitive way is a combination of

 (27:16) 

many, many different disciplines, many different engineering, many different business, many

 (27:22) 

different human resource-related skill sets to develop an organization to create that

 (27:30) 

capability at scale and to produce it efficiently.

 (27:33) 

So I couldn't point to one skill other than, I'll go back to communication, collaboration are key to success, especially when you have to work with the complexity of semiconductors and the time it takes to develop them and bring them into a full-scale manufacturing capability.

 (27:56) 

That can take anywhere from three, in some cases I'd say seven plus years, depending on what your starting point is on developing the next generation capability.

(28:08) 

A lot of good challenges.

 (28:10) 

Well everybody, that's Ron Martino and he's with NXP Semiconductors.

 (28:17) 

I can't thank you enough for coming in today and sharing your background with us and helping to inspire us for the next frontier.

(28:26) 

Well it's a pleasure being here and I enjoyed the conversation.

 (28:29) 

Bye everybody.

 (28:30) 

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Tomorrow's World Today podcast.

(28:36) 

Join us next time as we continue to explore the worlds of inspiration, creation, innovation and production.

 (28:44) 

Discover more at tomorrowsworldtoday.com and connect with us on social media at TWTExplore.

 (28:52) 

And find us wherever podcasts are available.