Q: Who were your mentors at the
Clark School, and do you stay in
touch with them today?
A: “If I were to pick one person, it would
certainly be my thesis advisor Perinkulam
Krishnaprasad, professor of electrical and
computer engineering. He did not constrain me or other students in our research pursuits. He gave us lots of freedom, and that is incredibly valuable. In many ways, my work drew him into new areas, which he supported. I am at the university three times a year for various board meetings, and I do look him up.”

Q: What led to your first entrepreneurial
venture with Numerical Technologies?
A: “That was a function of moving to
Stanford and the Silicon Valley area in the
early to mid-1990s when there was a flurry
of activity, mostly around Internet companies and a variety of start-up technology companies. You can’t avoid thinking about entrepreneurship in that environment. The core technology for Numerical Technologies came from my work at Stanford. The environment fosters thinking about commercial applications that you can either take into the market

yourself as a company or someone else can take and run with. The Clark School did not have that environment at the time, but it has since developed it.”

Q: What were key factors in your
success?
A: “Aside from timing and luck, having
the right people around you is very important. It goes along with the environment. I had some very good people, as board members, general advisors and mentors, who provided the right infrastructure.”

Q: Did your ventures seem risky to
you at the time?
A: “I get asked that question constantly.
Most people who start companies or even
join early startups do not think about it
in terms of risk. They would be focusing
on the wrong things. You need to look
at what you get to build. Do you come
out of it with a set of skills that are more
valuable? In startups, you are able to do
a number of things you could never do
in a large company. An engineer could
be involved in or even drive a marketing
effort. Those are skills that are valuable
throughout your career.

The most difficult thing was calling
my father, who is a long-time professor at
Maryland. He had been in academe for 45
years and came from a very academic family. I told him that I was leaving Harvard
(where I was then an assistant professor)
to move back to the West Coast to work
on this company. The questions that came
back to me included risk, but ultimately
the big question was: “Do they pay well?”
In that context, I thought, who is ‘they’
and what is ‘pay’?”

Q: What has been the impact of your work on the semiconductor industry?
A: “The net impact is very high. The
semiconductor industry, at the time, was
struggling with the dilemma of continuing
to decrease feature sizes. The engine
for that industry has been the continual
decrease in the size of circuit elements,
fabricated on a chip that costs less and
consumes less power. There was a perceived road block at the time, and we
were able to create the technology and
tools to enable the semiconductor industry to keep going along its path. Virtually every chip in the world is made using that technology.”

Q: How would you describe how
your work has improved people’s
lives?
A: “We use the electronics and chips in
virtually every aspect of our lives today,
whether it’s the phone or the computer. We have come to count on constant
improvement in our gadgets and devices