Dr. Suhas S. Patil

An entrepreneur and venture capitalist, he founded the company Cirrus Logic a fabless semiconductor company. Over the years, his work has covered computer architecture, parallel processing computers, mathematics for computer science, design methodology for very large integrated circuits and IC design automation software. He has over 40 scientific papers covering these areas of research and he is also the recipient of several patents in the field of integrated circuits. He was born in Jamshedpur India. He received his B. Tech (Honors) in Electronics and Electrical Communications from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, in 1965, his M.S.EE degree from MIT. He received his Doctor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1970. From 1970 until 1975, he was Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While at MIT, he also served as Assistant Director of Project MAC (Multi-Access Computer), the largest computer science laboratory in the U.S, where the timesharing computer system was developed. At MIT, he worked in the area of Computer Architecture and related topics. In 1975 he moved to the University of Utah. There he became a pioneer in applying his knowledge of computer architecture to new world of Very-large-scale integration (VLSI); the process of creating integrated circuits by combining thousands of transistors into a single chip. The microprocessor is a VLSI device. He received an Honorary Doctor of Science degree from IIT Kharagpur along with Dr. Abdul Kalam (former President of India) in 1995. He was the first to receive the Entrepreneurial Achievement Award form PanIIT in 2009. He founded Patil Systems, Inc., (1981) in Salt Lake City, which was renamed as Cirrus Logic in 1984 when it moved to Silicon Valley. He is the Chairman Emeritus of Cirrus Logic since 1997. He is the Chairman of Digit?, Inc., which was earlier named Tufan Infotech. He is also Chairman and CEO of Cradle Technologies, a Silicon Valley company that makes advanced networked video surveillance products. He also serves on the Boards of The Tech Museum and the World Affairs Council of Northern California. He co-founded a global not for profit organization, the TiE ? The Ind-US Entrepreneurs in 1992, together with successful entrepreneurs and businessmen of Indian origin in Silicon Valley for nurturing and mentoring entrepreneurs and young companies. He served as TiE's first President. He is an angel investor in numerous start-ups, like Vitalect. As a gift to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he awarded $1.5 million for the construction of the Suhas and Jayashree Patil Conference Center at the Stata Center. He served on the Board of Trustees of The Computer History Museum, The Tech Museum and the World Affairs Council of Northern California.