Maryam rofougaran, ceo & co-founder, movandi
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An unedited transcript is below.
Ali Tabibian:
Welcome. Welcome. Welcome everyone to this episode of Tech. Cars. Machines. This is your host Ali Tabibian. As always, you'll find more information about me and this podcast series in the show notes. As you our intrepid listeners know, I frequently say that Tech. Cars. Machines. covers the way sensors, connectivity, and analytics cross and bring together the worlds of technology and machines.
A few of you have written me to point out that we haven't lived up to our byline in an important way. That is we haven't talked enough about the world of connectivity. Well, you speak and we listen. Today's episode is very special because we bring you one of the entrepreneurs whose career has not only spanned, but to a large extent has helped define the extent to which device connectivity has flourished. This great technologist and business executive is Maryam Rofougaran.
Almost 25 years ago Maryam co-founded a company in Southern California called in Innovent. Innovent's technical breakthroughs started the process of integrating the dizzying array of connectivity options we've come to expect in our devices; Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, and carrier standards, such as LTE, 5G and so on. Innovent was acquired by Broadcom where Maryam spent about 15 years being a big contributor to human progress from being shackled to landlines to today's ubiquitous access to mobile connectivity in every corner of the earth. Not a bad start to a career.
I'll paraphrase semiconductor industry legend and Broadcom co-founder Henry Samueli to describe Maryam's impact. "Much of the credit for Broadcom's huge success is due to Maryam's engineering team leadership. Maryam held the title of senior vice president for radio frequency engineering at Broadcom, and she became a role model for women in engineering leadership positions in the semiconductor industry."
Today, Maryam is the chief executive of Movandi, a company which like Innovent is based south of Los Angeles. And which also like Innovent she co-founded with her brother Reza. Movandi is about 5G networks, especially the very disruptive, in a good way, 5G millimeter wave portion of the standard. Their products create significant improvements in wireless connectivity and offer better coverage, extended range, faster performance and less latency at 1/10th the cost of competing alternatives.
These claims may sound like ones we've become used to hearing from startups, but bear in mind that the tremendous promise of 5G comes with unusually significant trade offs. These trade offs are between cost, range, performance and other key parameters and resolving these trade offs are more critical than they were in any prior standards migration. Thus, if successful, the impact of the second act of Maryam's career will be even greater than the one from the first act. With further ado, let's get to it.
Ali Tabibian:
So welcome everyone to this episode of Tech. Cars. Machines. We have a wonderful guest for you today. Maryam Rofougaran joining us here from Southern California. A very impressive background. Will give us a lot of insight on the world of connectivity. And as you know Tech. Cars. Machines. is about the world of sensors, connectivity, and analytics. We probably couldn't have a better guest with more history and more accomplishment on the world of connectivity and how it's developed over time than Maryam. So Maryam thank you so much for taking the time. Welcome.
Maryam Rofougaran:
Thank you very much for having me in your program. It's very nice to be here.
Ali Tabibian:
Great. Thank you very much. In this program we've had the great, great guests. I saw you speak a couple months ago at an investor conference arranged by one of your major investors and one of the big names in investing in the valley here. I was very impressed thought there was a lot of insight, especially on the emerging 5G deployments and standard that we could really benefit from your insights on. First, tell us how you pronounce your name. Obviously we both speak Farsi. Maryam and then Rofougaran is how we would pronounce it. How would you pronounce it in English? Just give us a taste for what has worked in terms of the pronunciation for your name.
Maryam Rofougaran:
Okay. So yeah, as you said it my name in Farsi is Maryam Rofougaran and in the U.S. when people pronounce it, they pronounce it mostly Maryam Rofougaran and Maryam, Maryam they're all coming from the same source, which is Mary and basically Virgin Mary and it's common all over the world. So that's where it comes from my first name.
Ali Tabibian:
That's right. Little known fact, if you ever visit around, there are plenty of churches. And where I grew up in Tehran, there was a Sarkisian church, which was an Armenian church and right across from it is, was the Maryam Park. Park of Maryam which was a big feature, a beautiful building of our neighborhood.
Maryam Rofougaran:
Yeah, it's actually a very common name. And again, it's global. And as you all know, Maryam Mirzakhani was the very first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in mathematic. And she was Persian and she was the very first woman to receive that award, which was very, very impressive and it's an honor for all of us.
Ali Tabibian:
Absolutely. For some of our guests who might have missed that name, you're probably familiar with her story, both from our achievements and unfortunately, because of her untimely death from cancer a few years ago, while she was a professor at Stanford, I think.
Maryam Rofougaran:
That's right.
Ali Tabibian:
That will probably jog a lot of memories. You know Maryam I can't wait to get to the more technical parts of the discussion, but you have a very interesting background, and where you started, there was a little girl with a lot of dreams. Take us back there where you grew up, what your dreams were and how does the life you're living now match what your dreams were?
Maryam Rofougaran:
Yeah. This is a very long journey and it's been very exciting. I was born and raised in Iran. This was basically, I was in the fifth grade when revolution happened so I went to school before and after revolution. And during this whole time, I think one thing that I always had in me was the interest that I had in math and later in physics, as I got older and I got introduced to physics as well.
But one of the things that really, really fascinated me was how these numbers work. And for me at that time, it was almost like playing games. So one of my hobbies was just working on numbers, formalized which was always with me from the beginning. But as I got older, it became even more stronger. And then I got introduced to physics and laws of how things work and it was just fascinating.
I always found that very interesting and we used to play games and a lot of them had to do with numbers and guessing numbers. And that's one of the things that was with me from the beginning. And so in our culture back in Iran, and I think many countries around that area, education is really important. And no matter what kind of family you are in, they all want their children to get educated and get to higher levels of education. My dad was a businessman himself and my mom did not even go to college. And this is years ago. The reason they didn't is not because they didn't have the hunger to go and learn more and they weren't smart, was just their conditions. Like my dad, his dad passed away when he was three years old and then he had to support his family.
So they really wanted their children to get highly educated and that was in my family. So my siblings were all sort of high achievers. And in that kind of environment, it actually promotes you to become more and more interested in science and in getting higher education. So my mom was always encouraging us even though I was a girl, she taught me that there's no limits to what you can dream or what you want to do. She was very open minded.
So there were a few things that I think got me to where I am today. One is the love for math and physics as I mentioned, and how I wanted to learn how things work and if there is something happening, what is behind it, right. The other thing was curiosity, as I mentioned anything that I observed, I wanted to know why and how it's happening.
My competitiveness, unfortunately, I think again it comes from the culture and the family that I was raised in. So I was in the class and the teacher was teaching math, et cetera I always wanted to either question the challenges or try to find ways that could make it... Some alternative ways to prove that. And also showing that I can do it, right, proving myself. And I think all these things really helped me in getting to where I am.
So initially, my interest was mostly becoming a scientist because I could see what Einstein and Newton had done. And I was fascinated by what I learned about them, the physics. And I would go get books, read them, even if I didn't understand it, but I was so amazed by what they had done. So I always thought that one day, hopefully I can get to even win a Nobel Prize, et cetera.
And so I really wanted to continue my education. I wanted to get to higher educations. And once my parents sent me to the United States, the first thing that happened, I basically went to the lab with my brother where he was working in the UCLA engineering lab and he showed me what they were working on in electrical engineering. It sounded so interesting because it sounded like it's a field that uses this applications of math and physics. And then I started actually getting involved in that field.
And then over time as we were working on our projects for our thesis, which my brother was leading in at that point was it was a project that basically initially got us into this whole wireless industry and kind of changed the whole... I would say actually in a way, revolutionized the connectivity going forward. So we were working on trying for the very first time to show that we can integrate radios with the baseband digital. Because in the past radios were being implemented in very exotic processes baseband, and digital were all in CMOS, low cost process notes. Nobody thought that you could actually bring this together, put it on a very tiny chip and make products out of it.
Maryam Rofougaran:
So, that's something that we proved. We actually worked on when we were at UCLA. I finished my master. I was doing half PhD and my brother was on his PhD. So we were able to show for the very first time, we're talking about 1993 and 1994, that you could make a very tiny chip SoC with the full radios on it and that can work. And that was really, really fundamental to going forward in what happened later on connectivity.
And while we were doing that, my interest from being a scientist started changing also to entrepreneurship and making business. And then I started looking up to people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. And then my interest kind of shifted from just being a scientist into getting entrepreneurship and business. And that's how everything basically got to where I got into entrepreneurship.
Ali Tabibian:
Wow. That's amazing. Let me go back a little bit in terms of where you started. So you gravitated toward technical subjects in a nurturing environment, but not one that was really the... You didn't really have the stereotypical immigrant parents like I did, who wanted us to either be doctors or engineers. It was just something that you gravitated toward, naturally.
Maryam Rofougaran:
Well, actually let me correct that. No, my mom and my dad wanted all of us to become doctors, by the way. That's natural in Iran, right?
Ali Tabibian:
That's right.
Maryam Rofougaran:
So the first thing is doctors, then it becomes other stuff maybe engineers, but it's interesting because out of the four of us only my sister who's between me and my brother, Reza, loved to become a doctor and she became a doctor. But the rest of us, the three of us just naturally. I think one reason is because math was easy for us too. Like it was so easy and interesting. To be honest with you, when I was going to high school, my mom actually enrolled me in, you know how it is, from the beginning you choose whether you want to go to engineering or you want to go to medical school-
Ali Tabibian:
Natural sciences, correct.
Maryam Rofougaran:
Exactly. So she enrolled me in that natural sciences biology. And my teachers were surprised all because they knew how good I was in math. But then when I got here, when I came to the U.S... And even during that time, I would go to the math classes and learn more on my own. So when I came here, my brother was already in engineering and he loved it that I go in the same field that he was. And there was nobody here to tell me, "Go become a doctor or engineer." So I naturally got into that myself because of the interest that I had. But yeah, there's always pressure that everyone wants you to become a doctor back in Iran.
Ali Tabibian:
Yeah. So very briefly. Two things, we had the same thing in my family. My sister is a doctor and I did engineering, but what I also really liked about your description is you just loved it. Because when I tell people, I was an electrical engineer and still work in technology, you frequently get the sense that they feel like it was a... Other people think it's almost as a burden, something you made it through being an engineer. And I just liked it. I played with gadgets when I was a kid. I was fascinated by the way things work. It was exciting to me to walk through an Intel fab, which I did when I was a student. And so I'm glad that your enthusiasm is something that people when listening to this podcast they can sense.
And to the extent that we have people at a younger age, occasionally listening to these, most of our viewers are already established in their careers. But if we have younger people or maybe they can send it to their kids and say, "Listen to this," if you have the aptitude, it's really enjoyable to take it all the way through. And it doesn't end necessarily, unless you want it to as a technical endeavor. You can move into business as well as you did.
Let me go back a little bit to back in the day, if you broke open a device and looked at it, a device that was at a communications function to wireless communications, you'd see different boards in it. One board was kind of what you see on TV and in the movies or whatever, this giant fab that spits out things in volume and uses a manufacturing process called CMOS, which has really been the foundation for the wonderful cost declines that we've seen over decades in the semiconductor industry.
And then there would be a separate board that treated things a little bit more like a physical antenna that you saw. It was more of a mechanical. They didn't really look like the cool semiconductor stuff, as much as the things on the other board. And obviously that's costly. It costs more to make that antenna board, it's costly to have two boards because then you have to assemble it. And there's all sorts of downsides to that. And what you are basically saying is everybody said, "Hey, you know what? That antenna is just too different for us to use a volume semiconductor process for." And you and your brother and your company Innovent were the first people in the world to prove everyone wrong. Did I get that right in terms of the description?
Maryam Rofougaran:
Yeah, pretty much. I think you summarized it right. So again, going back to that time, early 90s, most of the radios or all of the radios, even the most integrated points, the antenna point they were in exotic processes like early masonite by CMOS process. So, that had to be separate from the board that was more integrated with the digital modern baseband. And that basically whether it was cellular or any other kind of radio, that's why it was. And I think at that point it was really only cellular radios that where... For example, if you look at the cell phones, which at that point were still big they had started to become smaller, but they started really big devices.
And as time went on, they got smaller, smaller and higher performance. But I remember when I came here, still those phones, first of all, they were just becoming available and they were still big sizes because exactly these components that were using the cell phones were still not as much integrated. Or there was no capability of integration of them. So cellular itself, like 2G, 3G was there, but the radios were still separate. The antennas were separate. They were not fully integrated. And then the modern baseband was separated.
And there was no Bluetooth, there was no Wi-Fi. No one could even imagine that these devices or these components can get integrated into cell phone. Because if you remember, in terms of, for example, had a huge board for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth did not even exist. So what we observed when we were working on this integration at UCLA, we realized that, especially short range connectivity doesn't exist. There were some sort of proprietary application between mouse and keyboard in some companies but nothing else. There was no standard. There was nothing common. And you could not see anything that could be integrated into mobile devices.
So while working in this project we realized the potential this could have on the whole industry and wireless connectivity. And then we started thinking about how we can bring that into basically products and bring this into market and enable wireless connectivity starting with short range and then expanding it into even more. So that we could see.
In the meantime, while we were doing that, and we started to work on starting our company, et cetera. I think the whole world started realizing short range needs some sort of standard. So when we started, we weren't even thinking about Bluetooth, we weren't thinking about Wi-Fi. We just knew that the world needs this solution, more integration, bringing a standard for short range wireless communication. And there was no standard.
So we started to show we're able to make SoC bring everything into one chip. And in the meantime, coming up with some sort of standard, but luckily then Bluetooth standards started taking there was consortium by Ericson and everything. Again, it was just the standard, nothing that's how you make it so low cost that goes into every mobile device. So we were able to take advantage of it to basically start developing this... Taking our innovation, making a product for this new standard that was still being debated, should it be this, should it be that?
And we developed the SoC that had radio as well as baseband as well as everything integrated for Bluetooth on one chip. We did it very quickly at our startup Innovent System and that was about a year and a half. And after that we were able to show a demo of it. And it was so interesting that we got multiple companies wanted to acquire us and that's how I think it started. So we were able to bring this into devices because we were able to shrink. We were able to make it smaller so that it doesn't take much space in there. And on top of it made it low power consumption because batteries wireless devices are very important and the cost of it would reduce by a lot.
So that's why we were able to bring Bluetooth and then Wi-Fi, which was even more challenging. And later on, that was not enough. We decided to bring both of the systems into one chip, into CMOS and we called it Combo chips. And that's where we captured 95% of the market share and left that market completely.
Ali Tabibian:
Innovent which was a UCLA spinoff, essentially got acquired by another UCLA spinoff, which is Broadcom a name that exists today. So tell me, what year did you sell to Broadcom after how many years at Innovent did that happen?
Maryam Rofougaran:
So we sold Innovent to Broadcom, July, 2000. We had started the company almost end of 1998, but that's when officially we actually got the funding, et cetera. But prior to that we were for sure working on setting up the company, et cetera. But yeah, it took us about a year and a half from the time we got the series A and funding to when we sold the company. And during that one and a half year, we developed the company SoC and were able to show the chip and prototype, et cetera.
Ali Tabibian:
Yeah, that's amazing. And if I recall correctly, it was a very sizable transaction. It was about 400 million. Did I recall correctly?
Maryam Rofougaran:
At the time when we signed the deal, it was about 450 million. And by the time we closed it because Broadcom actually joined S&P right after signing this.
Ali Tabibian:
Oh, the impacts.
Maryam Rofougaran:
So it almost became double. But then later, five, six months later or so in 2001 there was recession too. But I think the timing was actually very good.
Ali Tabibian:
It was a great achievement. And so what you did at Innovent was the basically be able to implement the antennas in CMOS. And then it was the series of additional integrations and product progressions that was done at Broadcom. Is that correct?
Maryam Rofougaran:
That's correct. So what we went into Broadcom with was really our chips that had Bluetooth in it, but we had already planned to modify. So the architecture had been done in a way that we could quickly turn that into Wi-Fi 11B. So as soon as we became Broadcom, not only we started making the Bluetooth to become product and start shipping that, but he also started working on making the Wi-Fi chip available. And soon we had that.
And then after that, we basically started putting the two SoC together make it one SoC, which would support both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. And we called it Combo Wi-Fi/Bluetooth. And that's the solution that we see in most of the phones today, probably all the phones, I would say. Still have iPhones and Samsung. And then after that, we added GPS to it. So we brought GPS into the same chip. We did even further integration. We put NFC in it, but that one, I think later we separated NFC and we kept the Combo chip.
But generally speaking. So that's the Combo chip that went into the cell phone. But beyond that, we worked on GPS, we worked on many other. We started working on radios for cellular. We started with the... We made the very first 2G integrated cellular, radios were separated from baseband. We actually put that together. We made one chip out of it because those days 2G was still shipping. And then we did 3G radio. We got into 4G, Femto.
So pretty much all the standards that in wireless we've worked on. We even did FM. We actually, I integrated FM with our Combo chips, with the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi because Nokia and all the customers were asking for it. So yeah, so we entered Broadcom with nothing in wireless and we sort of set up the wireless in Broadcom and grew it to be shipping billions of devices per year, more than $3 billion annual revenue in a few years.
Ali Tabibian:
Great. And clearly right now, you're at your own startup Movandi. How many years were you at Broadcom? And the corollary question to that is, we talked about how quickly you'd made progress at, Innovent. And then it seems you got a lot done at Broadcom as well. So tell us how long were you at Broadcom and then maybe compare what it's like to innovate at Innovent versus inside a large entity like Broadcom.
Maryam Rofougaran:
So we remained with Broadcom for almost 16 years before we departed and started Movandi. But we actually had the Combo chips and everything shipping in a few years right after our acquisition. So our execution was, I would say actually awesome. It was very good. So one thing that we have always been very, very focused on is that you bring the right talent, smart people, you need combination of smart, fresh ideas, as well as people who have experience and you need to be on top of things, right?
You need to make sure you have the right vision. You bring interns, you train them. And so the efficiency and execution really comes all the way from top to bottom level. And we have been trying to make sure that we have the excellent team and we grew the team at Broadcom to hundreds of, at one point about 600 people, et cetera.
So, we were able to quickly ramp up. Broadcom generally was a company that was famous for its technical excellence and many of the new grad or new students who graduated they really wanted to join Broadcom and that was very helpful. So at Movandi today, we've done the same thing. I think, the first couple of years, actually, we started the company and in about nine months we had a prototype of this whole thing for me, we were showing to people and they were all amazed by how much success we had during that time. So execution, innovation are really important to us.
Ali Tabibian:
Excellent. It sounds like you had both the success for people to let you continue what you were doing inside of Broadcom. I don't want to say protection, but probably had the mandate right from the top from Henry Samueli himself as well, which as our listeners, from some of our other episodes know, especially with the Bill Ruh with GE and the one with General Motors, you kind of need that from the top as well. You need some runway from the top, but then that team better execute and validate why a senior executive had confidence in them. Seems like both of those came together nicely.
Maryam Rofougaran:
Yeah. That's completely true. Especially when you are new to a company, you have to have the support and you have to have belief from top level management, otherwise it could be very challenging. And there were one of the reasons we actually merged with Broadcom was a couple of reasons. First of all, we knew Henry and Nick, both from UCLA. Henry was actually sort of involved with the project that we were doing at UCLA on the baseband side of it, because it was a project that was four different professors were involved on the antenna side and the RF baseband and signal processing. And so Henry was involved he knew what he had done. He was very familiar with our capabilities and that's why they were both eager to acquire Innovent.
We had others as well, but for us, it was a chemistry. We knew Henry. Henry, such a great guy. And we knew that merging with that company would probably be the better choice because it would have his support. Broadcom did not have anything in wireless when we joined them, it was all cable more than a wireless. And it was great because we thought we could actually become the wireless and that's exactly what happened.
So there was usually when you merge companies might have some conflict, could make it more complicated, but this was like an open field. And as you know, Broadcom was a great company. They were aggressive. They wanted to expand market share new businesses and made a lot of sense for us. Again, during this time Henry and the management were very supportive and this was like a startup within the bigger startup because they themselves had just done IPO and so it was a really nice environment to be in and they would let us to continue innovate and build the big portfolio wireless.
And there were other companies that they acquired and they all got integrated really nicely, were able to bring other bigger talent or some technology and build a big portfolio of wireless at Broadcom. I think that was very, very helpful.
Ali Tabibian:
Excellent. Thank you for that background. In some of the offline conversations we had, and some of the things I've seen you speak to, you've mentioned a couple times that you recommend that people look for a hard problem to solve if they're looking specifically to establish their own startup. What is the hard problem that you saw that made you decide to form Movandi, which is your startup post Broadcom?
Maryam Rofougaran:
Basically, we started Movandi to make the next generation of wireless. As I mentioned to you, at Broadcom we really did a lot. We worked on every wireless standards and all the way cellular 4G carrier, everything, right. But Wi-Fi, all flavors, 11ax, 11ac. But then the next generation is really something that would enable everything, can support huge number of devices because this whole IoT now after so many years, I think IoT really has grown now. It's got to the level that within, let's say for example, just one enterprise, there's so many data, so much data coming from cameras, coming from sensors.
So, that eventually is happening today. And it requires a huge capacity support. It actually requires a huge amount of now with AI and processing, et cetera, there's so much that can be done. It could completely change this whole picture of data as well as smartness, but that all these things require transformation, transferring data, transferring of all these data to a center, whether it's local, whether it's over cloud, but somewhere that this data can be used processed well very quickly with no latency so that we can enable some of these new applications like AR/VR. Asking a lot of this automotive cars, etcetera.
And the only way to do that is if you can make something that's very broad, gets supported by cellular, which comes to 5G, right. But again, 5G has to be more than just incremental to 4G or to 3G or whatever has happened in the past. If you look at 2G going to 3G to 4G. 2G started with enabling people to do voice and some text, 3G brought faster a little bit more coming in being able to access internet that was very slow. Eventually 4G made it faster. So now people can use their phones to do internet search, download, streaming video, et cetera, but still we can see that it's not that efficient, right.
So 5G is supposed to be really changing the game. And it's more than just a smart device in people hands, right. Because if you look at every G that has happened in the past, it's usually limited to mostly to you who holding the device whether it's iPad or the cell phone. 5G is supposed to go way beyond it. It's supposed to connect everything to everything. And that requires capacity. But again, for that to happen, eventually you really have to have a huge bandwidth and spectrum. You can't be limited to small bandwidth that are at lower frequency or mid frequency bandwidth. You have to go to very high frequencies to be able to get the maximum capacity, be able to support thousands of devices at the same time to be able to get the lowest latency possible.
And that's why we thought, we want to make sure that real 5G that everyone talks about with the promise of being so fast and being able to do so quick, lowest latency happen. And there were challenges to going to high frequency. We're talking about 20 gigahertz in the past above because of the physics as you know, the wavelength issues, et cetera. And that's why we said, okay, we're going to focus on addressing this challenge and come up with solutions to make this a possibility.
Ali Tabibian:
Excellent. Thank you. So actually this might be an interesting way of showing the discontinuity that 5G is set to bring. What were the typical frequencies at which 2G, 3G, 4G operated versus across this 5G?
Maryam Rofougaran:
So it started the lower frequency lower than 1 gigahertz at the 600, 700, 900 megahertz then going to, I think LT at the end can support two, but up to 2 gigahertz. So now in 5G, again, there are 5G in different kinds of band. So there is a low frequency, which is still lower than 1G. They call it low band. There is mid-band, which is between one to six gigahertz, depending on where you are in the world. I think in the U.S., it's mostly 3, 3.5 gigahertz. And then it's high frequency or millimeter wave, which is 20, 40 gigahertz and above. And it goes all the way to even 39 gigahertz, 47 gigahertz. So there are different bands.
Again, if you stay for 5G in low band, there are improvement that can be done. And that's by getting some more allocations of the bandwidth channels, doing carrier application, doing massive MIMO, et cetera, which is incremental. Again, you don't see a huge benefit over 4G because you are still limited by how much bandwidth you can get.
Then mid-band allows somewhat more, still incremental, so you can get higher speed. You can probably get, let's say in some cases so even 1 gigabit, I would say. If you do massive MIMO, huge number of antennas and use the very high modulation techniques, all this, but you still have low but you don't have the same channel bandwidth that you can get or huge amount of bandwidth you get in the mid-band. And on top of it, even if you do get, let's say a pick of up to 500 megahertz per second or something. The number of users will improve relative to 4G because we are doing massive MIMO receptor, but still nowhere close to what you can get with millimeter wave.
For example, if I'm here and I'm the only person with a device that has mid-band, and I'm the only one who's using the device, I can get very very fast in speed. But if there are another, let's say a 100 people all of a sudden, then that will drop, right? But with millimeter wave, you can have another probably 1,000 people and you would still be able to get the fastest speed that you were having. So that's why millimeter wave initially because of its challenges may not be easy to deploy outdoor because it needs more devices, but for indoor enterprises businesses where actually there are a lot of devices as well as people using it and capacity is needed, should be perfect.
Ali Tabibian:
In this technical chain, exactly, where and what is Movandi attacking? What specific thing are you looking to solve?
Maryam Rofougaran:
So our initial focus as I mentioned, was trying to make the real promise of 5G happen. Which is everyone says huge number of devices and fast speed, lowest latency, and that can only happen in millimeter wave. But again, because it has challenges with the distance and how far it can go and the blockage, et cetera, it makes it not as much practical. So we've been focusing on trying to address this challenges, the blockage issue and find ways that we can come up with a low cost system that can address this and make sure that you can go around the building. You can go around blockage. And that's what we have been trying to do.
Having said that we're also working on integrating even solutions in mid-band which bring the lot more integration. For example, today people have FBGA and then they have front-end devices from companies. And they put all that together to make eight by eight or four by four solutions for radio head, et cetera in mid-band. And those are expensive. They have a lot of power consumption. So now that we have built the millimeter wave and we know that we can address those challenges, we're also trying to get the mid-band, very integrated solution and have this complete front-end.
Because going forward in the future, I believe that this will coexist. You would have both mid-band and you would have also high-band. And many devices should be able to switch depending, like again switching, depending if you go on very high speed and if you have some problem it automatically can go to mid-band for coverage and switch back on both.
Ali Tabibian:
That's pretty fascinating. It seems like the aspiration for Movandi is a lot broader than it was for Innovent. In other words Innovent had a very specific manufacturing process oriented to break through that it was achieving, but you have a much more of a system approach of Movandi. You're really trying to make the whole offering better rather than a particular implementation of it.
Maryam Rofougaran:
Correct. And at Innovent, it was more like bringing everything into one chip, making it low cost, making it low power to be able to penetrate and get all the market into mobile devices. But at the same time, it did have system aspect into it. And then that's how later we're able to actually bring a lot more when we became Broadcom and add on top of it. But here it's a different challenge, right? This is a lot, as you said, it's actually, it requires a lot more vision working with many different partners, bringing, educating them.
Trying to basically make it so broad and bring everything together to all the way, mid-band, millimeter wave and come up with also applications, ideas for applications, business model. Because again, you are now we're dealing with operators as well and how this thing would get deployed. And if you look at what some of the things we have done, trying to show how we can bring the costs of deployment and the total cost of deployment to be lower.
Because again, specifically in the area of millimeter wave, if you need to go provide coverage and you have to put because of the range and penetration industry, where you have to put a base station at every corner and have a tower, et cetera, it becomes very impractical, right. So we have to not only come up with solutions that help this, which we have done with our smart repeaters, for example, which reduces the number by a lot with small solutions that are a lot easier to deploy and bring the cost of deployment lower. But also working on innovative solution with partners where we announced the partnership, for example, with Ubicquia that owns the street lights and they have access to the street lights that already has the power that's needed it already...
So they can very quickly take small solutions of our smart repeater put it on their street lights and over the cloud manage it. And so these things are very important. So that's why it's a lot more involved than just going and trying to put a chip inside a mobile device that we had on before.
Ali Tabibian:
That's right. It's interesting. I know one of the things we talked about that I was going to ask you about, and I know we're kind of running to the end of our time here. One of the other hard problems that the transition to 5G is going to bring about, but based on what you just described, a lot more opportunity, a lot more promise, but many more hard problems to solve in the 4G to 5G transition that's certainly at the higher frequencies.
It almost sounds like the number of things that are both exciting, but need to be treated and changed and dealt with at both the customer premises, the customer, the device designer, the infrastructure, providers, the carriers, everybody will have a bigger and more complicated role to play then maybe in the sum of the 2G through 4G transitions. Am I viewing this as accurately? It's that big.
Maryam Rofougaran:
I think so, but that's exactly why the impact is a lot bigger than what 2G, 3G, or 4G had as well, right. They were limited to mainly getting more speed, et cetera. Now, this 5G is really, I mean, I would say people keep talking about 5G being revolutionized. That's why there are more complication and there are more challenges to solve. But the good news is that once this is solved and it's in place, there would be huge impact on this whole wireless. Because it really enables everything that people talk about, AI artificial intelligence.
Because you know right now data maybe there, right. Processors with AI algorithm may be there, but you need a link. You need to be able to get a link that's fast enough and has lowest latency to be able to connect it without... AI with no data has no use, right. And if you have to go and bring cables and fibers, every single thing to be able to make that happen, you won't see all these exciting applications and everything that people talk about. Robots, managing and traffic lights.
All these things have to have a solution like what 5G can bring to the picture. And that's why, I think it's very exciting. That's why we really find it interesting. And we have been really at it. And I think for this, it really requires a lot of innovation, as I mentioned, not just technology, even on the business side, even on how you work with partners. And that's why startups can really be big in this area because big companies usually have the traditional way of thinking.
And you need some fresh new ideas and forces in here and that's what we're trying to do. And eventually I see all these bands, mid-band, millimeter wave all working together to make all these applications possible.
Ali Tabibian:
That's very, very promising, very impressive, very exciting for yourselves and for new entrants into the environment, whether they'd be individual starting careers or other startups. Basically, I'm looking at some of my notes here and you've already answered a lot of the questions that I had without me needing to ask them. So I appreciate that very much.
Let me end it kind of where we started because I've listened to everything you've done and everything you're about to do. And it reminds me of really my own family situation, where my wife is very accomplished and has continued step of a wonderful career of our own. What can you say that could rescue others who maybe have the same challenges?
Maryam Rofougaran:
So I think first of all, you really have to be interested in what you're doing because you have to have the commitment and dedication to no matter how things. And there are tough times, there are good times and there has to be resilience enough in the person as well as interest enough and dedication to keep it going.
I think fortunately that's one of the thing I have built. I've been able to build that in myself. To be honest with you, I would characterize myself as a shy girl in the beginning and not having as much confidence, especially when I came here to the U.S. because completely different culture and not knowing the language, et cetera. But over time, not giving up, not quitting and dealing with tough situations, it's just built more resilience in me, given me toughness to be able to handle situation.
At the same time, I have a family, right? I mean, I have children. Actually, I'm blessed with two, one boy, one girl, and I'm so proud of them and my husband and it is not easy to try to manage everything as you said it. And I'm working really, I mean, I would say I work really hard. But at the same time, my family has been very important to me. My children. I would never want to sacrifice anything. That is still is my priority.
But one thing is I think things that are important for all having good partner. My brother and I have been working together for a long time, actually my sister too. And you know, it's always good to know that there is somebody else that cares as much that has the same goal. And you don't doubt each other. You have each other's support. So partners are really important.
Secondly, my family, again, it's been very helpful to have my husband feeling responsible and supporting what I do and helping with my children, making sure that nothing gets sacrificed there. And my parents and his parents have been very helpful. So I feel so that I can feel comfortable while I'm traveling, et cetera, somebody's taking care of my kids. But yeah, it is something challenging and we really have to love it to be able to basically manage.
Ali Tabibian:
Great. That's good advice and I'm glad you didn't sugarcoat it either, right. It just takes a constant commitment to making it work on the part of a lot of people to make it happen. And I'll add one thing to this Maryam as well. In retrospect, as our kids are pretty much almost out of the house, it really helped to live in a major Metro area. And especially if you're in tech to be on the Western U.S., because the number of resources, the number of other people who are in a similar situation, the ability, the compactness of the geographies, the fact that 75% of your work can be done in this time zone even if you're going up to Seattle or up to the Bay Area in your case down, to L.A. in our case, that's been a coincidentally very helpful circumstance for us as well to make it all happen.
Maryam Rofougaran:
No, you're absolutely right. Yeah. That's a good point. It has helped a lot. And luckily, in 90s was in new Iran and came here, I don't think I had even seen a computer and I come to the lab and I see this huge, still at that time laptop is still isn't common. But at nowadays you go to schools and you see kids having access to all these. There are a lot of things that are available that were not available before. I think all these things are helpful and make it easy for me when I'm on the other side of the world to be able to FaceTime talk to my kids. But at the same time, this whole social media, etcetera, is a challenge too through.
Somehow you have to, you constantly have to worry about, okay, what are your kids watching, or we seem might be reaching out to them, et cetera. So with advancing technology, there are challenges that come as well. And I think overall it's for better, as long as we can manage that, working on this whole security, et cetera, I think that are very important, secure channels, secure links, and putting some more visibility as what the kids were doing, et cetera. All those are I think very helpful going forward.
Ali Tabibian:
Maryam, you've heard of the expression drinking from a fire hose. It's been in an immense pleasure to have this time with you, and maybe we'll have you on for a second wrap. Because there was so much more that I think we can unpack. And maybe at some point that hopefully this was enjoyable enough. Well, you'll view it as a recharge from your busy schedule as opposed to an interruption to it. And we appreciate it very much.
Maryam Rofougaran:
Thank you. No, this was very exciting. I'm always excited to talk about what we're doing and of what we're trying to do to help and it's amazing. I'm not sure if I told you, but the very first time I saw remember Razr was a really big thing at one point, the phone, and that's years ago, right. When Motorola had come up with it, that was a really cool phone.
Ali Tabibian:
I had that Razr phone.
Maryam Rofougaran:
And when was at the airport and I saw teenagers showing it off to each other and saying, "Oh, by the way, I have Bluetooth in." It was just so exciting. It's just so good to see what you have actually done and built, become something that people can brag about and help people. So no, I'm always happy to chat about what we're doing and what we're trying to do to change the world and help everybody.
Ali Tabibian:
Excellent. Well, thank you so much.