I was born in Hyderabad. After studying B. Tech. (Electronics Engineering) from IT-BHU, I did my MS (Electronics Engineering) from University of Iowa.

 

After my Masters, I joined Intel as an ASIC design engineer and was working on Microprocessor chips. I left Intel after 4 years and was part of the original team in a startup called S3. At that time Microsoft Windows was just coming on to PCs and S3 was formed to accelerate the Windows on PCs. Our first product arguably the world first Windows accelerator ended up improving the Windows experience on PCs dramatically The product was widely accepted and we were shipping to all PC manufacturers. Later, I became the Vice President of Engineering for S3 and grew my business unit to $500M revenues.  The Company went IPO in 1993 and became an industry leader. Later I left the company and came back to Bangalore mostly for family reasons. This was in 1997. Myself and a friend started a company called Thinkit Technologies, Inc. doing ASICs for the networking Industry. It was an interesting and challenging experience to start a business in India. We had to hire and train every engineer as what we were doing was fairly new in India.

 

This product interested Intel which wanted to get into Networking to extend their dominance in the PC space.. Intel acquired the company in year 2000. I left Intel in 2003 and joined Nvidia as they were looking for someone to lead their entry into India.

 

Graphics is a very specialized domain, but it uses basic computer architecture techniques. Nvidia is focused on Visual Computing and it provides continuous learning opportunities. Since what we do are visual products, the expectations from the market are very high. Every architecture has to improve the performance by at least 2 fold to make a difference. The challenges are how to achieve good performance with low power consumption while keeping the product costs reasonable.

 

 

Visual computing is a natural interface in dealing with machines. It is widely used in all areas including movie industry, design of cars and creating many new products in all Industrial domains.. Beyond that, the architectures good for Visual Computing can improve some complex computing bottlenecks like Protein Folding, Molecular Dynamics.

The computing model over the next few years will change and will evolve towards architectures which did graphics well using massive parallelism.

 

In addition Nano-Technology and Energy industries will drive the growth in VLSI technologies.

 

 

We already have an extremely impressive campus. We need to improve institute facilities and infrastructure to attract good professors to ITBHU. Beyond that, we need to improve facilities for students. An example would be to build a good student activity center. I like to focus on these two areas which make ITBHU an attractive destination for professors and students. One should be proud to teach or study in that institute.

 

 

My wife Madhavi is a masters in computer science who worked for the first five years. Now she is a serious golfer with a handicap of 7.

 

My daughter Mayura is in 12^th grade and seems interested in Biology/Life Sciences. My son Rogan is in 11^th grade has varied and ever changing interests.

 

I play tennis twice a week whenever I am not traveling. Generally I like to spend outdoors being physically active.

 

 

Sridhar Manthani can be contacted at: smanthani[AT]nvidia.com

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