Keith Odom

As a National Instruments R&D Fellow, Keith Odom directs the company’s architecture and technology group, a team of highly respected senior engineers who develop new architectures and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and serve as technical leads on many projects.

Through his leadership and innovation, Odom has led NI to incredible success with ASIC and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) designs, resulting in more than 50 patents in areas that include bus interfacing, hardware/software interaction, reconfigurable I/O, and timing/synchronization. In addition, Odom was instrumental in developing key architectures including the NI-STC, a device system timing controller for NI data acquisition devices; the NI CompactDAQ modular data acquisition system; the NI Synchronization and Memory Core (SMC) architecture for the company’s high-speed modular instruments; PXI; NI LabVIEW FPGA; and bus interfaces for NI PCI, USB, and PCI Express devices.

While focused primarily on technical challenges, Odom has also served in a variety of managerial and talent development roles at NI. He has made significant contributions to the evolution of the company including mentoring and developing key programs to maximize the technical capabilities and innovative nature of employees. Odom has been a key leader in helping the company foster a strong technical career path and innovative spirit as a founder and sponsor of a regular internal technology conference, NITech, and encouraging research on identified technology gaps.

In 2006, Odom was elected as an Outstanding Young Engineering Graduate for The University of Texas at Austin, an honor bestowed upon individuals age 40 and under for distinguished contributions in the realms of professional accomplishment, community service, and service to the UT school of engineering. In addition, Odom has served on the Engineering Advisory Council for The University of Texas at Austin electrical and computer engineering department.

Odom holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering with a computer engineering specialization and a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering with a focus on VLSI design and computer architecture from The University of Texas at Austin.