From routers to tiny devices: How Rajesh Subramaniam built embedUR and is pushing intelligence onto smaller radios

The useful part

Now he wants it inside much smaller things | YourStory The first thing Rajesh Subramaniam wanted was to sort the lighting. "I just want to make sure my lighting is not that bad and you can still see me," he said, before we had got anywhere near his company or his plans for it. When I told him the story would be written and not filmed, he settled back into his chair and talked for the better part of an hour about Wi-Fi.

How it works

• Wi-Fi and the short-range signals that go with it have paid his bills for 22 years.
• The work itself is software, and it sits inside your router, your speakers, and the watch on your wrist, allowing your device to talk to another device without a wire running between them.
• He went on to Bay Networks, which by then was being folded into Nortel, and there he wrote software for early switching gear, back when offices still pushed data around on hubs that broadcast everything to...
• He knew small devices, he knew networks, and he knew the infrastructure which keeps a network standing when a lot of people use it at once.
• What arrives after that is packets to be sorted and passed on, and sorting packets was what he had spent 10 years doing on wired networks.

What to take from it

That's enterprise Wi-Fi, and it's fussy work, because a company network has to satisfy itself about who you are before it lets you anywhere near anything. A coffee machine that holds a couple of hundred faces and pours your cappuccino because that is what you always order. I had asked him at the start to put the business in plain terms so that our readers can understand.

Example or evidence

• The company builds something once and then sells it over and over again.
• embedUR has ended up building those libraries for them.

Details worth keeping

ADVERTISEMENT His software is inside your router. Subramaniam founded embedUR Systems in 2004 and still runs it. Hardly anybody outside the chip industry has heard of the company, and a fair number of very large chip companies would struggle to manage without it.

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