VINOD DHAM - Father of Pentium
Vinod Dham (born 1950 in Pune, Maharashtra, India) is an Indian inventor and venture capitalist.Coming to India during Partition from Rawalpindi, Dham's father joined the army as a civilian. Dham was born in Pune (across the railway station in Cowasji Hospital, says Dham) as his father was posted there. Vinod completed his undergraduate education in Electrical Engineering from the Delhi College of Engineering.
In 1971, after graduation, he joined a Delhi-based semiconductor company called Continental Devices. In 1975, he left this job and joined University of Cincinnati to pursue a masters degree in Electrical Engineering, where he specialized in Solid State Science. After completing his masters degree in 1977, he joined NCR Corporation at Dayton, Ohio. He then joined Intel, and started working on the Pentium chip. He is called the "Father of Pentium" for his role in the development of the Pentium processor. He is also one of the co-inventers of non-volatile flash memory.[citation needed] He rose to the position of vice-president of Intel. He left Intel in 1995, and joined a number of startups including NexGen, which was acquired by AMD, and then went on to Silicon Spice, which was acquired by Broadcom in 2000. He is also the co-founding partner of New Path Ventures which has funded Companies like Nevis Networks. In an interview, Dham revealed that he came to the United States with only "$8 in his pocket". He was part of the board of directors of Satyam Computer Services Ltd. that approved the purchase of construction company Maytas (owned by the same family that owns Satyam), worth $225 Million, for $1.6 billion. The deal was presented to the shareholders as if it were an irreversible decision by the board. Finally, the deal fell apart due to institutional shareholder protests. He resigned from the Satyam board on December 28, 2008.
Q n A- Vinod Dham
Q: You came with very little money?
A: I came with $8. In the 1970s, the government of India had little money to spare for foreign travel. They gave $8 to foreign tourists. As a student, I could get an additional $20. You had to go to the reserve bank of India. You had to apply. But it was such a corrupt country at the time; you had to bribe somebody to get the $20. I refused to do that. I said I’ll just go with $8.
Q:How did you get off the ground in the U.S. with just $8?
A: That was the most amazing part. I kept it with me. There were many distractions. Even on the plane, they would sell cartons of cigarettes. People used to smoke. I used to smoke. The carton cost about as much as I had. The hostess offered me just one. I said I could live without smoking for a day. I went to the foreign student office. There was a lady named Mary Campbell. She had been corresponding with me for a year. She asked what she could do for me. I asked about my research assistant job. That was supposed to pay $325. She said I don’t get that money until I did a month of work. I told her I needed $75 to get into an efficiency and $15 for health insurance. I needed $90 to survive, and I needed more for food. She went to a room and came back with $125 in cash. She said it was a distress fund. I paid it back at zero percent interest at about $25 a month. She saved my butt.
Q:You got work in semiconductors after school?
A: I went to work for NCR. I had some experience from India. I worked on non-volatile memory (which stores data when the power is off). I had a mentor there, Murray Trudel, who was my boss, my friend. I was like the apprentice. We created some fundamental work. He sent me to present a paper, which was where I met Bill Johnson, a director at Intel. He stole me away to work at Intel. I worked with Stefan Lai and a new college grad from Berkeley. The three of us invented Intel’s flash memory business.
Q:Tell us how you became the father of the Pentium?
A: I left R&D to get involved in Intel’s business with customers. I wanted to be a general manager instead of staying with a white coat in a lab. My first foray there was working on the 386 microprocessor. It was on its 15th or so rev through the factory. A guy named Gene Hill used to run it. They didn’t know why the yield was half a chip per wafer. (Normally, it’s around 100 good chips per wafer). Intel had a lot of pressure because Motorola had its 32-bit chip out already. I got into a task force with Craig Barrett.
[Intel co-founder] Gordon Moore got it together because this was a disaster for the company. I was a manufacturing technologist, not a chip designer. We found that a coupling in the chip was not properly designed. Within nine months, we got to 21 chips per wafer. That was a big boost for me within Intel. In return for doing that, they let me learn about microprocessors. I started with the new versions of the 386. Then we moved on to 486s. I had to try to build a multi-billion dollar business. Once we succeeded, Andy Grove asked me to do the next one, Pentium. I got associated with this chip.
Q:You left Intel in 1995 after 16 years there. Was it a tough decision?
A: One of the best decisions I ever made was joining Intel. And the next-best decision was to leave Intel. This entire world of venture capital that I am now in – I didn’t know it. You build something when everything is stacked up against you. It’s not the way life is inside a big company. I would have never experienced this start-up life and it is far more fulfilling and learning.
Q:It was the breakaway chip for Intel?
A: It was big. But it caught attention because it was the chip that used different branding instead of the numbers. Pentium was where we wanted to breakaway from the crowd: Sun Microsystems and MIPS Computer and Motorola. The pressure was enormous.
Q: There was a bug that led to embarrassment for Intel and a $425 million write-off. What did you take away from the Pentium bug experience?
A: The reality never really got told. In my mind, when you are in that position of responsibility, then you have to acknowledge it. There was a paranoia inside that this admission would cause the company to fold and disappear. That was blown way out of proportion. If you own 80 percent of the market, you have to be honest and acknowledge it.
Q: Well, it’s your fault & the Pentiums fault dat everybody wants to play Guitar Hero now instead of study math.
A: We had no clue that it would lead to that and the Internet and this whole idea of Thomas Friedman’s book “The World is Flat.” There was no way to let the intelligence flow back and forth across the world so easily. Now it is possible.