A passage of engineering talent back to India

IN D R A N IL M U K H E R J E E /A F P P H O T O ENGINEERING • Last July, when the “Pentium champ” Vinod Dham floated NewPath Ventures in Bangalore, India, industry watchers took note—observers of trends in semiconductors and information technology (IT), as well as students of international migration patterns. Dham’s stated objective was to incubate five hybrid Indo–U.S. technology companies to focus on chipmaking, embedded software, and system design, taking advantage of India’s prodigious engineering resources. Observers are sitting up in their chairs again as Insilica, the first of the five companies, is taking shape in Bangalore to make chip sets for cellular phones and eventually to manufacture entire phones. Dham appears to be representative of a new trend, the propensity of Indian hightech professionals to return to their home country, utilizing what they learned abroad to harness India’s high-quality engineering workforce in a low–business-cost environment. Dham, like many other Indian professionals who have cut their teeth abroad, has a lot to offer his home country. After arriving in the United States in 1975 on an engineering scholarship at the University of Cincinnati, he went on to lead the Pentium team at Intel Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.), earning the sobriquet of Father of the Pentium. In a subsequent job at Broadcom Corp., he became acquainted with Tushar Dave, an émigré Indian engineer with a similar background, who has joined him in organizing NewPath Ventures. The lure of India is obvious, says Vinod Khosla, the wellknown Silicon Valley venture capitalist and general partner in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (Menlo Park, Calif.). “Indians here feel close to India and their families in India, so this result is hardly surprising. They also bring additional knowledge about the global economy and international competitive practices and standards back to India,” he told IEEE Spectrum.