The ‘father of the Pentium processor’ Vinod Dham is out on a mission—one that is closely connected with his passion for designing chips. The man with the ‘Pentium brain’ is out to pave a ‘new path’ for India to move into hardware. ‘‘Ten years from now, we want India to be known as a hardware centre, the same way as Indian software is known worldwide today,’’ Dham says.One of the most influential Indian-Americans, who has donned the covers of Fortune and Forbes, Dham is now wearing a new hat of being a mentor and incubator in the field of chip designing. ‘‘One thing lacking in India is capital in the technology area. Chip design is more capital intensive and expensive. We want to set up a core chip design infrastructure to provide turnkey solutions from specifications to products,’’ says Dham, who took on chip giant Intel by joining its competitor AMD and was instrumental in bringing the world’s fastest K6 processor to the market. Dham: The master in chip designing Bangalore: Vinod Dham, known as the ‘Father of Pentium’, is the leading figure in Silicon Valley. In 1975, the India-born Vinod Dham arrived in the US on an engineering scholarship at the University of Cincinnati, with less than $10 in his pocket. His first job at NCR was in 1977, working for the memory design group. Impressed with his paper on reprogrammable memory, Intel took him on. As the leader of Intel’s Pentium team in the early 1990s he earned the title, ‘Father of the Pentium’. Later he quit to join a start up, Nexgen. Three years later, AMD’s K6 chip, based on the Nexgen technology, gave nightmares to the people at Intel. Dham was invaluable to the world of chip design. He left AMD to work as CEO of another big company— Silicon Spice, a Mountain View, California startup (started in 1997) focusing on communications chips. Broadcom later acquired Silicon Spice, adding Vinod Dham to the management team in the process. (ENS) Along with serial entrepreneur Tushar Dave, who raked in $100 million when he sold Armedia to Broadcom, Dham has founded NewPath Ventures LLC, a hybrid Indo-US incubator. Having secured $40-million capital from NEA, CMEA Ventures and Chrys Capital and with an additional $10 million in the pipeline, Dham is proactively engaged in creating 3 to 5 hybrid companies in two years that will focus on various technology areas like chip, embedded software and system design.The first company that Dham and his partner have identified is on the chip design front and appropriately based in the Silicon Plateau of India. ‘‘Unlike other venture capitalists, we will play an intimate, proactive and hands-on role. The initial opportunities have come up in the telecom and entertainment area and this company will be designing customer-specific products. We are also incubating an idea in Hyderabad,’’ Dham told mediapersons here on Thursday.‘‘Demand for a lot of products have dried down and squeeze is being felt by everyone. All the companies across-the-board are looking at reducing costs. All the original equipment manufacturers are facing a tremendous emphasis on cost reduction. We will also develop certain technologies for reducing production costs,’’ says Dham.NewPath will be investing between $5 million and $10 million in the companies that are set up. ‘‘While the marketing, sales and technical support will be based in the US, implementation of design and development of products will be done in India. We want to leverage India’s tremendous technology talent pool to serve global markets and provide one-stop solutions,’’ he said. The prototype would be completed between 18 and 24 months and the new company would have 100 people by next year.
