Vinod Dham - Professional Career

Professional Career

As a young graduate in 1971 Dham worked for Continental Devices India Limited, Delhi, one of India’s only private silicon semiconductor start-ups at the time which collaborated with Teledyne Semiconductor in California. He was part of the early team that put together a facility in Delhi and worked there for four years. It wasn’t until he worked at this company that his love for semiconductors bloomed. He found it to be a very exciting field because it applied knowledge of physics, chemistry and mathematics he had learned as an engineer. Discovering he needed deeper understanding of the physics behind the behaviour of the semiconductor devices he left this job in 1975 and joined University of Cincinnati to pursue a master's degree in Electrical Engineering, where he specialised in Solid State Science. After completing his Masters degree in 1977, he joined NCR Corporation based in Dayton, Ohio, a company known for its cash registers. Joining NCR was not a planned career move though. At the University of Cincinnati when NCR needed help, Dham was the only student in his class who had worked longest in semi conductors. His leading edge work on Non Volatile Memories helped NCR get a patent in 1985 on mixed dielectric process and nonvolatile memory device. During a presentation of his work on Non-Volatile Memory for the NCR Microelectronics at an IEEE workshop in Monterey California, he was approached by Intel and joined the company in 1979 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 microprocessor division where he honed his skills for leading the Pentium project by working on two earlier generations of microprocessors – Intel’s 386 and 486 in various capacities. In the 80s, PCs had become mainstream tools for productivity enhancement at the workplace. By the time he started the Pentium project, a large number of established and new players, including the AIM consortium (a consortium led by Apple, IBM and Motorola) an Advanced Computing Environment (ACE) consortium formed in 1991 and led by Compaq, Microsoft, DEC, and MIPS Technologies, Inc, and a consortium by Sun Microsystems (which comprised companies like Sun, Fujitsu, Philips, Tatung and Amdahl), using superior RISC (Reduced Instructions Based Computing) had all begun aggressively working on their big idea for the PC industry and these projects seriously threatened Intel’s dominance in the segment. Dham believes that Intel’s ability to “focus and execute” while maintaining full compatibility of application software with its previous generation microprocessors was the key reason for its success over dozens of these big competitors. His role as a senior executive and project leader of the Pentium chip was acknowledged world over. From the ‘Intel Inside’ brand building campaigns to delivering a top notch product the whole mix worked brilliantly for Intel. In a Business Week cover story on Intel’s new processors, Dham was quoted as the general manager of 586 processor group. (586 was the internal name for the project until it was named 'Pentium' at the launch). Pentium was aimed at large computers as well as PCs, so Intel engineers had to envision how it would fit in those various systems. The designers first visited every major customer and major software houses such as Borland, Lotus and Microsoft, to ask what those companies wanted. And the result was a list of 147 specific features – many ranked differently from what Intel expected. Doing this at front end, Dham said, more than paid for itself by avoiding most revisions in later stages. Dham was most pleased about the mindset change. Pre-586, Intel engineers got their kicks from intellectual joy of devising elegant or efficient solutions to circuit-design problems, regardless of their value to customers. Now, said Dham, engineers think like customers. (Ref: Business India 5 – 18 June 1995) In 1995, at the age of 45, after spending 16 years at Intel and reaching the top management of the company, Dham had a “mid-­life crisis” and was itching to do something different. He believed if you live in Silicon Valley and have not experienced life as an entrepreneur in a world of startups, you have missed out on a very exciting learning experience.