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the-south-asian.com July / August 2006 |
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August/September Contents
Sufis - wisdom against 50
years of mountain Heritage cities:
Cotton - the fibre of
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Page
10 of 10 Telecom & Software - Trends & Future in South Asia
(cntd.) by
Salman Minhas
First published in
December 2001
Part II - Pakistan.
ATIQ RAZA
Bachelor's degree
[Honors] from the University of London,
Lives with his family in
Morgan Hill, California.
Value /Wealth created
about $ 4 billion by 2001.
Atiq Raza passed high school
[ St. Anthony’s & Aitchison College] in the late 1960’s from the old city
of Lahore -a center for educational and cultural [ arts & film making ]
excellence and dubbed as the Paris of India during the last days of British
rule.
After getting a Bachelor’s
degree in Electronics from University of London, Atiq flirted briefly with
work at the Haripur R& D Labs of the Pakistan Telecoms Corp. before heading
out to the US. After finishing his Master’s from Stanford University, where
Vinod Khosla [ Sun Micro Systems and Kleiner Perkins & Caufield Byers - the
venture capital company ] and he became friends. Atiq Raza worked at Amdhal
Corporation and VLSI Corp. in the Silicon Valley , California .
Atiq then took on the
colossal task of taking a handful of engineers at Nexgen [ a start-up
company] and challenging the total dominance of Intel in the Microprocessors
area. He describes it as a small army taking on the the forces of the Roman
Empire . He went on to sell Nexgen for $ 800 million to AMD instead of an
offer of 1.2 billion from the memory chip maker Micron. In 1999 he led AMD
to successfully produce and market the K-6 processors. thereby breaking
Intel’s monopoly of the microprocessor market in the world.
Working tirelessly on
weekends and working hands -on to execute the early production problems,
Atiq broke Intel’s hold by producing the world’s first 32- bit processors
running at 1000 Mhz
Soon after that, Atiq Raza,
calling the microprocessor an edge device, saw that the future lay in
building chips for the broadband communications, especially the last mile
problem. A problem that was being left unsolved by the Regional US Bell
companies and causing the economy to slow down. Raza left AMD to start a
new venture of his own in 1999.
Atiq Raza founded Raza
Foundries and Raza Ventures as a special breed of venture capital company
that has successfully pioneered a new concept in the Silicon Valley by
taking a team of engineers and rapidly ramping /bringing their ideas to
production and eventual buyout . In this way Raza ventures has established a
new milestone in creating intellectual capital and value generation in the
Silicon Valley .
Under Atiq Raza , Raza
Foundries have built Pacific Broadband communications [ cable modem
hardware - the last mile problem solution ] and Yuni Networks [ a Chinese
husband and wife team] which was sold for $ 300 million to Applied
Microcircuits in 2000. Storage area networks is another field that Raza
Foundries is developing . Atiq Raza also is guiding Pakistan’ efforts via the OPEN-US California Group to enter into the software market. Mr. Raza serves on the board of directors of AMCC, Maple Optical Systems, Nexsi Systems, Pacific Broadband Communications and several other private companies.
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