Innovator Profiles-Ajay Bhatt

Ajay Bhatt still remembers the exact time—11 a.m., Dec. 4, 2000—when he presented to Intel Corp. president Paul Otellini what was to become PCI Express, the interconnect technology Bhatt believed could take the mainstream computer industry into the gigahertz era.

The proposition for driving an initiative for a 2.5-GHz serial interconnect was no slam dunk. For years, the broad and often contentious PC industry had been debating the future of the decade-old Peripheral Component Interconnect, the 133-MHz link that was the backbone of millions of computers and embedded systems. By the end of 2000, a handful of proposals for the future of PCI had been circulating through industry groups for months. Everyone knew that in the age of gigahertz processors, something would have to replace PCI—but what?

As a lead architect on the Accelerated Graphics Port, a souped-up version of PCI for graphics chips, Bhatt knew the pressure points of the technology well. And as a lead architect in 1994 for the Universal Serial Bus, he had learned a thing or two about turning a ship as big as the PC industry.

Otellini apparently saw something of the architect's calm, reasoned approach in the midst of a brewing multicompany controversy. He gave Bhatt the green light to drive the industry initiative—a responsibility that in Intel's world comes with plenty of corporate resources and the clout to handpick one's own team.

Five years of hard work later, PCI Express is taking the computer world by storm. Intel packs the interconnect into all its desktop, server and notebook chip sets. A wide swath of PC OEMs and third parties is adopting it in chips and systems, and the embedded world is taking a hard look.

And today Bhatt, now director of architecture and planning for Intel's business computing group, remains a presence at technology conferences, dispensing his calm, reasoned viewpoints amid industry controversies.