Speaker: Brian Bajgrowicz, Director, Global Hardware Development
What is your name and role at Vantiva?
Brian Bajgrowicz: My name is Brian Bajgrowicz and I'm the director of Global Hardware Development here at Vantiva And I've been based in the Indianapolis area office for a little over 22 years.
What is the history of Vantiva in Indianapolis?
Brian Bajgrowicz: Vantiva has had a presence here in Indianapolis since the early 1920s when it opened a manufacturing plant on the east side of the city. Over the years, the company name has evolved from RCA to GE to Thompson to Technicolor and now Vantiva. Initially, all the facilities were focused on manufacturing of televisions and records. But in the mid 1990s, the site evolved to become the North American headquarters and an R&D site for Thompson at the time. That same era marked a shift from analog to digital for Vantiva and we were DirecTV's launch partner for the revolutionary digital satellite system receiver. We were actually the other day here in the office looking at one of the original chassis when we developed this, we had all of the names of everybody that worked on the product engraved in the tool, their signatures on the plastic. And it's a good trip down memory lane for a lot of us that know a lot of those people. Other notable products designed here in Indy include the first HDD DVR for DirecTV, and the first Docsis 1.0 cable modem. We even had one of the very first MP3 players called the Lira. More recently, we've obviously done Docsis 3.1 Wi-Fi gateways. And we launched the first Docsis 4.0 modem recently.
How effective is the Indy team in dealing with the fast-paced changes in the industry?
Brian Bajgrowicz: Over the last two plus decades, the Indianapolis team has continually taken on designs with new technology that's just evolving or is immature and figured out how to develop those into a mature product that's deployed to the market. This started with the MPEG-2 DirecTV system and continued on with Docsis 1, Docsis 2 now on to Docsis 4 and also includes Wi-Fi technologies from Wi-Fi 4 now on to Wi-Fi 7 that we've recently deployed.
What is the advantage of the engineering team in Indianapolis?
Brian Bajgrowicz: The Indianapolis team is a multidisciplinary group of electrical mechanical industrialization and software engineers that have worked together on a wide variety of products from televisions to set-top box to integrated circuit design to Docsis and satellite termination equipments, and Wi-Fi Gateways. Has experience in designing those high quality products in the most demanding of customers. Specifically DirecTV, Comcast, Charter have some of the toughest standards in the industry. Our team works very well with each other and as part of a the multinational global company that Vantiva is and we know how to work with other locations, third party subcontractors and contract manufacturers all over the world.
What are the key benefits and highlights of our new lab in Carmel?
Brian Bajgrowicz: The key benefit of our new Carmel lab is that it allowed us to co-locate all of our test capabilities under one roof and allowed for the installation of a new anechoic chamber for antenna measurements of TIS and TRP for Wi-Fi IOT and cellular networks. We also have a extensive materials analysis lab here in the facility that is our de facto field failure analysis point for global vantiva products that includes real time x-rays, color Fastness tests, vent hoods for chemical and flammability tests, precision force measurements and so on.
