Meet Thampy Thomas, The Unsung Malayali Semiconductor Trailblazer
Thampy Thomas, one of the least known India’s legendary engineers, is the hand behind the groundbreaking semiconductor development. Thamas, originally from Kochi in Kerala, was among the first Indians in the Silicon Valley in the 1960s. Believed to be the first startup in Silicon Valley to be founded by an Indian, the man kicked started Elxsi (now known as Tata Elxsi), a semiconductor company, in 1979.
Elxsi was the first computer company to use more than one processor. In 1986, Thomas founded NexGen, which made the first x86 processors with an internal Risc Architecture, which is standard on all x86 processors. Their processors translated code designed to run on the traditionally CISC-based x86 architecture to run on the chip’s internal RISC architecture.
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AMD acquired the NexGen in 1994 for 850 million, which prevented AMD from going bankrupt after the failure of its first independent chipset, the K5.
AMD rebranded the NexGen processor as the K6, which went on to become a great success and cemented AMD as a serious rival for Intel. He then started a successful venture capital firm in 1996 and is believed to be among the richest Malayalees in the World.
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Thomas holds a B.E. in Electrical Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani and a Ph.D. and M.S. in electrical engineering from Stanford University. Thomas was the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Elxsi from 1979 to 1985.
After the announcement of a competitor to Intel’s i386 line of CPUs, several tech experts called Thomas “a big-time defender of CISC architecture.
