This article is part of the Innovators 2023 issue.
When speaking of trailblazers within electronics innovation, the dedication and contributions of Mehmet Aslan have made profound impacts on accelerating future technologies.
Since 2017, Mehmet has played a critical role in the success of Tektronix and its stakeholders. A skilled engineer with a background in leading high-performing teams and technology strategy for global companies, Mehmet Aslan also is passionate about fostering an inclusive culture of engineers from diverse backgrounds to create new technological innovations.
Mehmet, and Tektronix, believe future innovations cannot occur without diversity in collaborative teams. He joined Tektronix with the goal of modernizing the 76-year-old company’s team culture while introducing agile development tools and processes that deliver results. His impact at Tektronix is felt throughout the organization.
He currently leads a large global team of software and hardware developers, engineers, product development, and advanced technology professionals, as well as manufacturing and marketing teams. He sets the technology strategy and roadmap creation for his teams, ensuring alignment with the overall corporate business strategy. During his time at Tektronix, he has implemented changes across the organizational structure that broke down siloed thinking, encouraging collaboration, teamwork, and accountability.
Mehmet was the first to chair Tektronix’s Black Excellence Matter employee resource group, which provides support to black engineers across the company and has inspired the executive team to create outreach and education opportunities for future engineers of color. He works with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) as well as historically Hispanic-serving institutions on a comprehensive approach to build new pathways toward the profession—from ensuring early and equal access to education, to reforming the college curriculum and experience, to building support and leadership trajectories within the industry.
He's also the executive sponsor of Tektronix’s Women in Technology (WIT) employee group, which has grown dramatically in both numbers and influence at Tektronix. As a result, the demographics of who Tektronix interviewed for positions, and its criteria for who and how the company hired, changed. Through the development of this group, the number of women in the engineering ranks increased as did the number of women in leadership positions.
Mehmet hopes to someday leave behind a legacy of creating a more inclusive workplace and accelerate future technologies by following his guiding principle of “innovation is only successful if you are inclusive of diverse points of view.”
Finally, Mehmet has earned more than 30 U.S. patents for sensing applications and data converters. His work covers a wide array of technological advances, including techniques to measure the temperature of remote integrated circuits (ICs) and regulate their temperature by the use of fan-control algorithms.
Among other patents, his innovations have been utilized for more than 20 years within PCs and game stations, both designed to reduce noise pollution surrounding processor operating regions and circuit techniques for better performance. His work within novel sensing applications has resulted in 3D-printing method improvements, with other patents improving data-converter performance for delta-sigma analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). As a result of his contributions, Mehmet was inducted into the National Semiconductor Patent Hall of Fame.
Read more articles in the Innovators 2022 issue.