Ajay Bhatt

Ajay Bhatt: The Engineer Behind the Rectangle

In 2009 Intel ran a television campaign in which office workers mobbed a computer architect as though he were a touring musician. The architect was Ajay Bhatt, whose team had given the world the Universal Serial Bus. He was not in the advertisement. Intel hired an actor, Sunil Narkar, to play him. It is a fitting piece of trivia about a man whose work is in almost every electronic device on earth and whose face is in none of them.

Baroda to Folsom

Bhatt was born on 6 September 1957 and took his Bachelor of Engineering in electrical engineering at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in 1980, then did graduate study at City College of New York. In 1990 he joined Intel as a senior staff architect working on chipset architecture at the company's Folsom, California site.

Chipset architecture is the plumbing of a computer — the logic that lets the processor talk to everything that is not the processor. It is exactly the vantage point from which the problem he became famous for is most visible, and most infuriating.

The Printer

The origin story is domestic and entirely credible to anyone who used a computer in the early 1990s. Bhatt was trying to install a printer for his wife and grew frustrated at having to reconfigure the machine to do it — at the thicket of incompatible ports and plugs on the back of the box, each with its own driver, and at drivers that regularly conflicted with one another. Adding a device to a personal computer was a specialist operation that could plausibly ruin an afternoon.

His analogy came from the wall. An electrical socket does not require you to reconfigure the house; you plug the appliance in and it works. He set out to build the computing equivalent: a single connector that would recognise a new device automatically and run it.

What USB Actually Did

The elegance is in the layer of translation. Before USB, each class of peripheral spoke its own dialect directly to the operating system, which needed a separate and often quarrelsome driver for each. USB interposed a common protocol: different devices' signals are translated into one centralised message stream that the operating system consumes uniformly. The consequence is that the complexity moves out of the user's afternoon and into a specification.

It was never a solo effort, and Bhatt has never claimed otherwise. His team included Shaun Knoll, Jeff Charles Morriss, Shelagh Callahan and Sudershan Bala Cadambi. Intel received the first USB patent in 1997, and six other companies contributed to the development of the protocol — which is the actual hard part of a standard, since a connector nobody else adopts is just a shape.

Roughly ten billion USB-equipped devices have shipped, a figure that puts it among the most consequential computer technologies ever fielded.

"The Cheapest Connector That We Could Afford"

Bhatt is refreshingly unromantic about the result. Asked about the physical plug — the flat rectangle that a generation of users learned they could somehow insert wrongly three times in a row — his explanation was economic rather than aesthetic. The team "found the cheapest connector that we could afford at that point," he said, "and that's what we've ended up living with."

That single sentence is the best available description of how mass standards actually get made. The decision that shaped billions of physical objects was a cost constraint, taken quickly, by people who did not know they were designing something permanent.

The Rest of the Career

USB is the famous one, but Bhatt's contribution to the modern PC is broader. He worked on Platform Power Management architecture and on the PCI Express specification, receiving an Achievement in Excellence Award in 2002 for the latter; PCI Express is the interconnect that graphics cards and solid-state drives still ride on today. He holds 132 U.S. and international patents and served as Intel's Chief I/O Architect, responsible for platform and interconnect strategy.

The recognition came steadily. GQ India listed him among influential global Indians in July 2010; he received the Light of India Award in 2012, and in 2013 he and his team won the European Inventor Award in the Non-European Countries category. In January 2025 the Indian government awarded him the Padma Shri, the country's fourth-highest civilian honour.

Why Ajay Is Called a Genius

The relevant faculty is not mathematical or theoretical, and inflating it would be a disservice. It is systems judgment — the ability to look at a mess of accumulated engineering decisions and identify the single layer of abstraction that would dissolve most of it at once. Plenty of engineers in 1994 knew that PC peripherals were a nightmare. The move that mattered was recognising that the fix was not a better port but a common protocol, and that the right model for it was the electrical socket: the user should supply no information at all. That is an act of simplification made under enormous constraint, since the answer also had to be cheap enough to put on every device in the world and open enough that Intel's competitors would adopt it.

The counter-case is strong and Bhatt largely concedes it himself. He is routinely called "the inventor of USB" and consistently describes himself as a co-inventor; the European Inventor Award went to him and his team, and four named colleagues plus six outside companies built the standard. Nobody quoted here calls him a genius — the citations say "inventor" and describe USB as one of the world's most important computer technologies, which is a claim about consequence rather than about intellect. The design has well-known flaws, most famously a connector chosen because it was the cheapest one available, which two decades of users then endured. And a great deal of his public fame is traceable to an advertisement in which someone else played him. What he has, on the record, is something less glamorous than genius and arguably more valuable: the judgment to pick the right abstraction, and the persistence to get an industry to agree on it.

Legacy

The measure of USB is that it disappeared. A technology that succeeds completely stops being noticed, and the specific relief it delivered — the end of driver conflicts, jumper settings and the reconfiguration ritual — is now unimaginable to anyone under thirty, which is the point. Ten billion devices later, Bhatt's other work on PCI Express and platform power management sits equally invisibly inside the same machines. He spent a career on the parts of computing nobody is supposed to think about, and the highest compliment available is that nobody does.

Achievements

• Educated at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and City University of New York
• Worked as inventor, computer scientist and engineer