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.
In recognition of his groundbreaking contributions, the Indian government honored Vinod Dham with the Padma Bhushan, India's third-highest civilian award, in 2025.

Early life

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 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.

Career

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. 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. 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 was then the Vice President of the Microprocessor Product Group and General Manager of Microprocessor Division 5/7 at the time. He is also one of the co-inventors of Intel's first Flash Memory Technology. He rose to the position of the Vice President of Micro-Processor Group at Intel.
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. 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. By the time he started the Pentium project, many established and new players, including the AIM consortium and the ACE consortium formed in 1991 and led by Compaq, Microsoft, DEC, and MIPS Technologies, and a consortium by Sun Microsystems using superior RISC 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.
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 the 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 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.

Entrepreneurial career

NexGen

When Dham joined Intel, it had $1 million in revenue. By the time he left in 1995, Intel's revenues had soared to US$16.2 billion. Dham said he was a keen observer of how Andy Grove built strategy and organisation for Intel's success in the microprocessor business. At Intel, Dham made a decision to work on processors when he decided to leave R&D. By the time he left Intel, his achievements had reached great prominence. It was also the time when the entrepreneurial revolution in Silicon Valley was at its peak. He came across a company called NexGen, a boutique processor design company that was eight years old, and joined as COO. The design engineering team at NexGen proved itself to be very capable, but the company did not have a chip that was bus-compatible with the Pentium, an important functionality that was needed to fit in the PC industry dominated by Intel. Dham, with his wide-ranging experience, did changes in NexGen's strategy, knowing that NexGen had to license intellectual property that would piggyback on infrastructure that had already been created by the rest of the PC industry and needed access to manufacturing capabilities and advanced technology by partnering with established players to build its chips competitively with Intel's.
While looking for the right partner for NexGen, Dham discovered that Advanced Micro Devices Inc. was Intel's main competitor in the computer hardware industry, but its microprocessor product, K5, which has been positioned to be a response to Intel's Pentium Processor, had failed to deliver on its promise. Dham convinced the NexGen management to explore what appeared to be a perfect synergy for merging the two companies - NexGen had a product but no factories and process technology, whereas AMD had a factory and advanced technology but no product. His insights proved right, and AMD acquired NexGen's product and process technology for $857 million. AMD's next product, K6, was built using NexGen's core technology. For a short while, it was the fastest processor in the world. It was the first time ever anybody beat Intel at its own speed game. The success of K6 was critical from one more angle: microprocessors were expensive, which meant that PCs had to be sold for over $1500. AMD, under Dham's leadership in the microprocessor business, priced K6 to create a PC below $1000. AMD's ability to give relevant competition to Intel and create a sub-$1000 PC played a key role in creating a sub-$1000 category for the first time. This positioning forced Intel to initially respond with a truncated Pentium under the brand name Celeron. After spending a year at AMD, post-acquisition of NexGen, Dham joined another startup in April 1998—Silicon Spice as CEO and president.

Silicon Spice

Dham, who had made a career out of microprocessors, was no longer interested in just chips and gained interest in communications processors. In his opinion, the Internet was the mother of all killer applications, which could use most computing power if there were no connectivity bottlenecks. Anyone who could help unclog this bottlenecks, would hold the key to a multi-billion-dollar bounty. "The PC was designed for computing and not for communication. The microprocessor has gone beyond its use," he said. In other words, hardware is far ahead of the current computing requirements," he said. With demand for communications-related chips then growing at 20% per annum, Dham and Silicon Spice's three MIT-graduate co-founders wanted a piece of the pie. Silicon Spice raised more than $34 million in VC funding from New Enterprise Associates and Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers.
Silicon Spice was initially experimenting with using an innovative reconfigurable technology to design chips. It turned out that the chips designed in this fashion lacked the necessary performance and cost to be of much commercial use. Meanwhile, Er. Ing. Dham learned from dealing with several customers that there was an emerging need for developing chips that could effectively transfer voice over the Internet. Dham explains, "The Internet protocol was being used mainly for data and delivering voice over the Internet, which was designed primarily for data transfer and was a tricky problem in terms of technology". Dham re-directed the company to build this new chip to support VoIP, among the first in the world at the time. Silicon Spice's technology was promising. In a little over two years, Er.Ing. Dham sold Silicon Spice to Broadcom for $1.2 billion in an all-stock deal. The deal was Broadcom's largest ever and its seventh acquisition in the year 2000. Broadcom's former CEO, Henry Nicholas, said that Silicon Spice's architecture for communications processors, which enables banks of chips to be replaced with a single piece of silicon, is Broadcom's most strategic buy yet and opens 'a multi-billion-dollar' opportunity. "This is kind of the holy grail of carrier-class communication equipment," Nicholas said. "What Silicon Spice has created is a whole new computational element of the same significance of what microprocessor was to PC." "One of the biggest lessons I learnt was that it always helps to start defining your product with very early involvement with customers, "said Dham.