Revolutionary Entrepreneurs

He is the Chairman Emeritus, co-founder and a director since 1984 of Cirrus Logic Incorporation. Recognized worldwide for its expertise in analog, mixed-signal, and DSP technologies (digital signal processing based systems), Cirrus Logic is the definitive semiconductor source for analog, mixed-signal, and DSP solutions. They have engineers around the globe designing and solving the industry's requirements. The revenue generated by Cirrus Logic for the third quarter of fiscal year 2005, ended Dec. 25, 2004 was in the region of US$44 million. Not bad for a professor from the academia.

His name is Suhas Patil, born in the Jamshedpur (in the Union territory of Jharkhand), India who came to the high tech industry from teaching. Suhas Patil received his degree in electronics and electrical communication from the Indian Institute of Technology in 1965 and his master's and doctorate in electrical engineering at MIT in 1967 and 1970. He taught computer science at MIT, and then moved on to the University of Utah. While there, from 1975 to 1980, he founded the VLSI (very large scale integration) group and worked on design methodology for complex integrated circuits.

He says of his early childhood as a very inquisitive child, who is always engaged in asking questions to his father. His father had a side business of repairing radios and through that he used his father's tools to work on wooden things, metal things and then electronic things. He learned English in order to read the Popular Science magazines, to understand what they were talking about. He says he did study English in school but he was not proficient in that or effective, and wanting to study those science books he made an effort to understand the language. Wanting to build a lab, to experiment with things, in his home while in high school Patil decided to manufacture his own Bunsen burner. The Bunsen burner needed gas which was not available at homes in India those days thus he decided to create gas from kerosene. He devised some things to build an apparatus to start taking kerosene and cracking it to make gas. When he tested it the whole lab of his, which was a cowshed behind his house, caught fire. "I was all the time working hard to catch up with what I was taught I could do", he says and also mentions that it was the motivation to get better and better which ultimately earned him a PhD from MIT.

The research that he was conducting in his field as a