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Dham good?

This article is more than 10 years old.

Vinod Dham, a man who has made a career out of microprocessors, is not interested in chips, which form the guts and brains of personal computers. Rather, he is preaching a new mantra: communications processors.

With demand for communications-related chips growing at 20% per annum, Dham and Silicon Spice's three cofounders, Ian Eslick, Ethan Mirsky and Rob French, want a piece of the pie. Last year alone, $16 billion dollars worth of communications chips were sold around the world.

Dham, whose work as a senior designer on Intel's Pentium team in the early 1990s earned him the sobriquet of "Father of the Pentium," quit Intel to join chip startup Nexgen.

Nexgen, which was targeting the Intel-clone market, was later acquired by Advanced Micro Devices in 1995 for about $500 million. Three years later, AMD's K6 chip, based on the Nexgen technology, has become a major irritant for Intel. These two achievements alone have made Dham somewhat of a star in the clandestine world of chip design.

Born in India, Dham arrived in the U.S. in 1975 on an engineering scholarship at the University of Cincinnati, with less than $10 in his pocket. By 1977, he was working for the memory design group at the then-Dayton, Ohio-based National Cash Register (NCR). At NCR, he wrote a paper on reprogrammable memory, which impressed the denizens at Intel enough that they offered him a job.

With demand for communications-related chips growing at 20% per annum, Dham and Silicon Spice's three cofounders want a piece of the pie.

Last November, the 47-year-old turned his back on the PC-world and left AMD. Dham says that he originally quit Intel to work with a startup (Nexgen), and after AMD bought Nexgen he found himself working for another big company. Silicon Spice, a Mountain View, Calif. startup focusing on communications chips, is a perfect fit, he claims.

"The microprocessor business has become less interesting business to me," says Dham. In his opinion, the Internet is the mother of all killer applications, which could utilize most computing power if there were no bandwidth bottleneck. Anyone, who can help unclog this bottleneck, holds the key to a multibillion dollar bounty.

"The personal computer was designed for computing, and not for communication. The microprocessor has gone beyond its use," he says. In other words, the hardware is far ahead of the current computing requirements. So is Silicon Spice competing with Intel? "No we are not competing with Intel, instead we are hitting the bandwidth bottleneck," says Dham.

Given that a big company environment so far has nurtured his career, it will be interesting to see how Dham deals with the pressures of running a startup. Will he succeed or will it be a false start? We await the outcome.