Vinod Dham

Vinod Dham is an Indian-American engineer, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist.

He is known as the 'Father of the Pentium Chip' for his contribution to the development of Intel's Pentium micro-processor.

He is also a mentor and advisor, and sits on the boards of companies, including startups funded through his India-based fund Indo-US Venture Partners, where he is the founding managing director.

Vinod Dham's accomplishments as 'Pentium Engineer' and as an Indian-American technology pioneer from Silicon Valley were observed at an exhibition on South Asians at the National Museum of Natural History, highlighting Indian-Americans who have helped shape America.

Vinod Dham was born in the 1950s in Pune, India.

His father was a member of the army civilian department who had moved from Rawalpindi, Punjab, Pakistan, to India during the Partition of India.

Dham graduated with a BE degree in Electrical Engineering from Delhi College of Engineering in 1971 at the age of 21.

At the age of 25, he left his family in Delhi, India, to study for an MS degree in Physics (Solid State) in the US, arriving with just $8 in his pocket.

He is married to Sadhana and has two sons.

He has three brothers and a sister.

After completing a BE degree in Electrical Engineering in 1971, Dham joined Delhi-based semiconductor manufacturer Continental Devices, one of India's only private silicon semiconductor start-ups at the time, which collaborated with Teradyne Semiconductor Company, USA.

He was a part of the early team that put together a facility in Delhi, where he worked for four years.

It was while he worked at this company that his love for semiconductors bloomed.

He found it to be an exciting field because it applied the knowledge he had learned as an engineer to his developing interests in understanding the physics behind the behaviour of semiconductor devices.

In 1975, he left this job and went to the University of Cincinnati in Ohio to pursue an MS degree in Physics (Solid-State).

After completing his MS degree in 1977, he joined NCR Corporation in Dayton, Ohio, as an engineer.

He did cutting-edge work on developing advanced non-volatile memories while there.

Joining NCR was not a planned career move, though.

At the University of Cincinnati, when NCR needed help, Dham was the student in his class who had worked the longest in semi-conductors.

During a presentation of his work on non-volatile memory for the NCR Microelectronics at an IEEE workshop, he was approached by Intel and, in 1979, joined Intel as an engineer, where he worked with the non-volatile memory team and was one of the co-inventors of Intel's first flash memory (ETOX).

He later moved to the micro-processor division, where he honed his skills for leading the Pentium project by working on two earlier generations of micro-processors—Intel's 386 and 486—in various capacities.

In the 1980s, PCs had become mainstream tools for productivity enhancement at the workplace.

His leading-edge work on the non-volatile memories helped NCR get a patent in 1985 on mixed dielectric process and non-volatile memory device.

He then joined Intel Corporation as an engineer, where he led the development of the world-famous Pentium processor.

He is called the "Pentium Engineer" for his role in the development of the Pentium Micro-Processor.

He is also one of the co-inventors of Intel's first Flash Memory Technology (ETOX).

He rose to the position of the Vice President of Micro-Processor Group at Intel.

By the time he started the Pentium project, many established and new players, including the AIM consortium (led by Apple, IBM, and Motorola) and the ACE (Advanced Computing Environment) consortium formed in 1991 and led by Compaq, Microsoft, DEC, and MIPS Technologies, and a consortium by Sun Microsystems (which comprised Sun, Fujitsu, Philips, Tatung, and Amdahl) using superior RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) had all begun aggressively working on their big idea for the PC industry, and these projects seriously threatened Intel's dominance in this segment.

Dham believes that Intel's ability to 'focus and execute' while maintaining full compatibility of the application with its previous-generation microprocessors was the key reason for its success over dozens of these big competitors.

In a Business Week cover story on Intel's new processors, Dham was quoted as General Manager of the 586 processor group (586 was the internal name for the project until it was named 'Pentium' at launch).

He left Intel in 1995 and joined the startup NexGen, which was subsequently acquired by AMD.

Dham played an instrumental role in the launch of K6 —the "Pentium killer" processor at rival AMD Co. He held the vice president position of AMD's Computation Products Group.

He then went on to lead a nascent startup, Silicon Spice, in April 1998, which he re-directed to build a VOIP chip and sold it to Broadcom in 2000.

He then launched an incubator, NewPath Ventures, where he co-founded companies with the objective of using India's emerging talent in chip design for R&D.

He is currently the managing director and founder of Indo-US Venture Partners, an early-stage India-focused fund that he founded after NewPath.

Dham has, over the years, been a board member and technical advisor to dozens of private and public companies worldwide.

In February 2015, Dham announced his return to entrepreneurship as the co-founder and CEO of Acadgild, an online educational platform he co-founded with Indian entrepreneur duo Krishnan Ganesh and Meena Ganesh of Tutorvista.

Acadgild aims to teach just about anybody, including a Class 10 student, software programming that is relevant to today's rapidly evolving digital world.

Unlike many existing online courses that rely on videos, Acadgild provides live mentoring and hands-on engagement for building real applications for its students.

It will also include building two applications, thus preparing the students with job-ready skills and a more effective way for their prospective employers to evaluate them.