Interview with Mr. Ajay Bhatt

The Media Club IIT (BHU) Varanasi, got the opportunity to interview Mr. Ajay Bhatt, the inventor of USB (Universal Serial Bus) and the developer of AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) as well as PCI Express and various other chipset improvements, during his visit to the 2018 edition of the institute’s annual techno-management fest, Technex, IIT (BHU) Varanasi.
Holding nearly 132 international patents, Mr. Ajay Bhatt has proven himself to be one of the most influential personalities acclaimed internationally and it was an honor for us to have a few words with him.

Here, we present an excerpt from the interview.

After graduating from India, you completed your Master’s degree from City University, New York. According to you, what role did this foreign education play in your success till now? What’s your take on the current education system in India?

That was long time ago — 38 years ago approximately and I think, Education, whether it’s here or there is going to empower anyone. In India, I did my Bachelors degree and learnt the basic skills and when I went to US, I equipped myself with advanced skills because in masters, you have time to specialize on certain things and particularly my experience at City University New York was quite rewarding as I got to work on a project of NASA which was great. So, education in India was great and it was augmented by that in US.

I don’t know whether it’s lagging because when I talk to students in India, I’m quite impressed by their resourcefulness, hard work and commitment. 2 million students apply to get over 10,000 seats, and that’s an amazing achievement for someone to get into an IIT. Funding is a bigger problem here than in the US. When I talked to the students here working on some projects, I got to know that they lack resources. However in US, the resources are enormous and easily accessible for the students! So, I think that if students here get as many resources as students in Germany and US get, then they can do much better than anybody else.

The early entrepreneurs often get discouraged during failures. Did you go through such a phase?

Well, my makeup was a little different. I was encouraged to experiment with things from childhood. I am the only engineer in the family, so even when I was very young in middle school, I was fixing the fuses and whatever I could fix, or I’d open things up and never put it back, but my parents tolerated all that stuff for me. So, they engendered curiosity in me and that gave me the confidence to build and this is the mindset I tell my daughter that anything you put your mind to, you should be able to do it.

What was your primary objective behind the invention of USB? And as our Tech world is going more towards wireless networking, what other innovations and inventions can we expect in the upcoming future?

There was a sort of self-imposed guideline that said, “We are confident and we can’t fail”. “Making more friendly tech for the users” — This was the motive behind the invention of USB. Generally, computers were used for tech purposes and people were not quite aware of its complete usage. In order to bring this technology to masses, it had to be made compatible and faster. So, it has been my life work to make computers easy for masses.

Talking about the future inventions, wireless technology is moving very quickly. We have 60 GHz radio; when you need a better performance beyond Wifi or Bluetooth, 60GHz radios will be very useful. They’ll give better bandwidth. Of course, we’re rapidly moving towards 5G that may give 10 times the performance of 4G. I think 5G is going to be a game changer and it can play a bigger role in market like that of India where you need a much different infrastructure to bring cable inside the house. Once you have multiple gigabits coming directly to your house, you can witness many other applications emerging.

You have been included as a part of Intel’s list of RockStars in the Tech World. What do you think about that?

Intel’s program emerged to demonstrate that all the engineers who work for Intel are RockStars. They all are innovators and I was just the face of all the engineers. I represented the capabilities and abilities of all the engineers and I was sort of the poster boy. Moreover, very often in industries, nobody knows who did what. We don’t know who came up with this camera or who came up with the battery that we’re using in this camera. The reason why Intel chose me rather than anyone else is because USB is something that most people understand. That is the reason why they chose me otherwise they could have chosen some physicist from our factory. So, I’m one of you; An engineer who says to rest of the world that “Engineers are RockStars”.

How has been your experience at Technex’18. A few words for our Tech people!

Well. I’m told that this is one of the oldest and the biggest techno-management fest of India and if I’m not wrong, of Asia. There are lots of exciting competitions going on all over the college. I didn’t get the chance to see all things but I saw some projects and it seems like the fest has a full agenda and people from all over the country and probably from some different countries participating too. So, I wish everyone attending this fest a very good luck and all the best and hope that you continue this tradition and do bigger better things in future. To the aspiring engineers, here’s my advice, “Anything you put your mind to, you should be able to do it.”