Looking Back, Connecting the Dots, On Reaching 40 Years in Semiconductors

As I take on my new role as Editor-in-Chief of EE Times, it’s a good time to reflect on this moment in time: I have now completed 40 years in the semiconductor and electronics industry. It’s been quite a journey, and I feel a sense of achievement to have been able to reinvent myself every few years, and keep doing things to stay relevant. I'm also thankful to the people along the way who have given me chances/opportunities to get on the next rung of my ‘career ladder’.

And as Steve Jobs once said, “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” I think this certainly holds true for me as I write this piece and think about all the influences that got me here.

It starts with disillusionment

The journey started with getting disillusioned with my degree course: in 1984, into my second year studying electronic engineering, I thought, "this is too much theory". Coincidentally, the university noticeboard carried a small advert from National Semiconductor, looking for an intern. I applied and took the opportunity to take a year out of studying to learn some 'real electronics'. That was September 1984. I would probably say looking back now that was probably the best move for my career: as a 21-year-old, as it gave me the grounding for everything to follow.

In that role as technical support engineer, I would support the FAEs (field application engineers) as the junior poring through masses of data books and data sheets, answering customer calls, and test out boards in the lab.

We all talk about mentors today, and in that role, and through thsi article, I'm going to mention many names who have helped me shape who I am today. I'll say from now,, It's not exhaustive, that would require a book. This is just a snapshot.

At National, I would give credit to Dave Brown and Ben Mullett, from whom I learned a lot, thanks to their patience and gentle guidance. That whole experience taught me empathy with customers’ problems (and the most common solution: switch off the power rail and switch on again!). When I returned to finish my final year of the degree, I had a better understanding of the practical aspects of electronics, and my final year project even involved building a system around the NSC800, a Z80 based processor, and building a wire-wrapped prototype on a standard breadboard.

The lesson from this is: hands-on experience and good mentors are the best teachers in life.

After graduating, I must have applied for 200 jobs in electronics but never got a single interview, apart from a graduate scheme with British Rail which I never got to final stage with. Mars Electronics was also close but I never got that. National, during the 1985 downturn, closed the Greenock (Scotland) fab and staff were on a three-day week, so they had nothing for me either.

In desperation, I spent the summer scanning through computer jobs in The Guardian newspaper every Thursday and spotted a tiny ad that said simply: “Editor required, recent electronics degree”. Armed with lab reports in hand I went for the interview and was hired on the spot! That was a with a monthly print magazine called Silicon Design, which then changed its name to EDA, capturing the growing trend with electronic design automation tools.

In this role I was regularly interviewing Daisy Systems, Cadnetix, Intergraph and others. Notable among my assignments was being one of the early reporters to cover the Xilinx LCA, an interview with Joe Costello of SDA in London, and meeting the likes of Robin Saxby at ES2. I also recall visiting Zycad to see their million-dollar accelerator at the time. And I recall being flown up to the famous Gleneagles golf course to interview Don Youd of Racal Redac during one of their customer events.

I had not a single ounce of knowledge of how to produce a print magazine, but thanks to guidance from Paul Marks and Kathy Pottle, and support from publisher Jeremy Kenyon, I was churning out my first print magazine just a few weeks into the job. After 12 months, I was told under my editorship the circulation had doubled!

Transition to PR and then Marconi

Next came a change into PR. After a short stint with a PR agency which I just didn’t enjoy (writing about paint, diesel engines and relays for Jotun, Volvo-Penta and Weidmuller respectively), I saw an opportunity in my local newspaper with a company making test and measurement equipment. With no flexibility in my PR job, I went for an early 8am meeting with the marcoms manager and PR manager, and I got the job! That started my six-year stint at Marconi Instruments, where I learned about many aspects of the test and measurement industry as well as PR, crisis communications, marketing, and more.

People I can thank here are Ray Gourd and Debbie Garnett for hiring me, and then working under the guidance of senior executives like Will Foster and Roy Lester.

Princess Diana, River Seine, and Brands Hatch

As PR manager, I recall organizing a press conference on the River Seine in Paris, launching new test equipment at Brands Hatch motor racing circuit, and having a story dropped after almost half a day filming at our factory by the BBC’s Nine O’clock News because Princess Diana started weeping that evening, so all news channels cleared the decks for this breaking story.

Next came an opportunity created by a gentle but effective man, Jeff Salter, whom I met at a GEC group house journal editors’ course. He asked me if I was enjoying my job, and I said yes but.. I’ll leave that bit out, but all I can say is that I ended up as international PR manager and also marcoms manager, handling huge budgets, managing eight PR agencies around the world, and spending every quarter travelling to the far east, Europe and across the US, ‘managing the message' from HQ in Swindon to agencies and offices.

Learning about cross-cultural business and media

This is where I learned a lot of the cultural differences between offices and also media in all the different regions. One of the highlights was a major international press event I organized to mark the opening of the first 8-inch SMIF fab in Europe at our facility near Plymouth, an operation spearheaded by John Hambidge, ex-Texas Instruments.

By 1996, just before a 10-day press trip to the US, I had dinner with another person whom I learned a lot from – Alan Elderfield. As managing director of one of the leading advertising agencies for the electronics sector at the time, he wanted me to head up the PR operation to grow the electronics business. On my return from the US, I took the opportunity to do something new, but I think I wasn’t yet ready for this type of role. After many visits and pitches (including to TSMC’s new office in Amsterdam), I may have been good at networking and making new contacts, but I just didn’t have the skills to close business.

I want to do an IPO in two years

On one occasion during my second agency stint, I pitched to a very small company at the Embedded Systems Show in London – the CEO and CTO seemed to immediately take to me. They didn’t want the agency, they wanted me, they insisted. So I went to their office in north London, where there was a large cutout in the lobby of a Nintendo game that was developed by the parent company, Argonaut Software. Upstairs I went, and was greeted by Bob Terwilliger and Rick Clucas, CEO and CTO respectively of Argonaut RISC Cores. Also in the office that day was Julie Meyer of NewMedia Investors.

That day is clear in my mind – after the interview, I drove down to London to have dinner with Bob and dropped Julie off to her office in Portland Place on the way. That evening, Bob told me at a restaurant in Regent Street: “I want to do an IPO in two years, and you’re going to be part of the team that helps me achieve that.”

And that was a rollercoaster for two years, where we all did everything needed, raising over ￡100 million and culminating in a billion-dollar IPO for the subsequently renamed ARC International in September 2000. I’ve highlighted some of that in this story in EE Times: “ARC: from 3D Game Chips to Licensable RISC Processor.”

To do all of that in just two years is a life-changing and career enhancing experience. The entire team of 20 or so people when I joined worked all hours, and I worked particularly closely with Bob, Rick, John Edelson, Tim Holden, Jason Good, and David Toombs, as well as stars like James Hakewill, Jon Sanders, Pete Warnes, Martin Kite, Stefano Zammattio, Aris Aristodemou, Daniel Hansson, Lee Hewitt, Ben Wimpory, and of course Jim Turley and Jez San.

I learned tremendously from everyone on the team, but credit goes to Bob, Rick, and John for giving me a free hand (from which I created a $2 million dollar marcoms spend budget – massive given we only had a small amount of money to deal with) from the get-go to do whatever was needed to build the brand, raise money, hire people, win customers and do the IPO. That’s worthy of a book on its own, maybe one day.

What happened after the IPO? I felt a new-found freedom and confidence.

Post-IPO: Freedom Be Whoever I Wanted to Be

So far, I highlighted some of the early influences in the first part of my career, first in the corporate world and then in the entrepreneurial world. It all started with learning from great FAEs at National Semiconductor and understanding real-world electronics through the needle of customers’ challenges.

The ARC IPO gave me strong credentials as people at the time remembered things like the first personalized ad campaign I created in EE Times back in early 1999, or being at every trade show doing the elevator pitch (past editor Brian Fuller once quoted me as the ‘ubiquitous Nitin Dahad’ in a writeup of the DAC conference in Los Angeles in 2000). My campaigns with the headlines as the ‘first user configurable 32-bit RISC processor’ used to wind up rival Tensilica a lot, and my first headline of ‘Arc challenges Arm’ which Electronic Weekly published on the front cover in 1998 surely wound up Arm.

But when I left in 2002, two years after the IPO, I thought I’d made it, bought a set of golf clubs, and started learning golf. That lasted just a few days, before Mike Risman of Apax Partners at the time suggested I speak to the CEO of one of his investee companies that was listed on Nasdaq but needed help with marketing.

Retiring the golf clubs to start TechSpark

So through his intro I met the CEO of Dialog Semiconductor at the time, Roland Pudelko, and that started a career in consulting and advisory services. I set up my consulting firm TechSpark in early 2002, and working alongside another advisor, Nigel Dixon who started T2M, we were able to elevate Dialog’s position in many ways. Nigel and I worked together several times successfully over the years with various other fabless semiconductor clients, many of which went on to successful exits of some sort.

In parallel, Pete Magowan, who had exited Arm and was now with Alta Berkeley Venture Partners, suggested I meet with one the companies he’d invested in, and that was the start of an on-off relationship with Anthony Sethill of Frontier Silicon. One of my achievements with Frontier was getting them on the front page of (the print edition) of EE Times, around CES in Las Vegas, among many others.

At TechSpark, clients kept coming – I started working with Rick Clucas again and his new colleague at Coresonic, the late Bert Zandhuis, and also with ex-Arc colleague Tony Lucido who’d by now introduced me to work with Jim Lindop, CEO at Jennic.

In parallel to TechSpark, another key influence whom I met at Arc was to shape me, both in good and not so good ways: the late Bipin Parmar. Bipin was one of these people who was well connected, was ex-Fairchild, used to run Dataquest’s semiconductor team in Europe, and all of his high-level connections gave him a lot of influence behind the scenes.

So in the summer after leaving Arc, Bipin, plus another ex-Arc colleague Woz Ahmed, and I dreamed up the idea of a magazine like Red Herring but more geared to supporting the semiconductor startup world – connecting startups to investors, advisors and others in the ecosystem. Hence for those who may remember that post-dot-com crash period, The Chilli was born, in August 2002. We made a real success of The Chilli with sponsors and supporters like Mentor Graphics, and our brand was known from Europe to Silicon Valley in the US and India.

The year 2008 saw us all on The Chilli distracted with other things, and with TechSpark’s clients all getting acquired or going to bigger agencies, I spent a year looking at the next thing to do. I chanced upon a meeting in Bangalore with Mike Ordish of UK Trade & Investment on a shuttle bus for an Indian Semiconductor Association event. When we talked, he said I should meet his boss.

Tech ambassador for the UK trade department

On return to London, I met with his boss, Bob Driver, and that was the start of a five-year period as a technology specialist adviser with UK Trade & Investment, supporting UK companies and missions around the world, speaking at conferences, accompanying ministers on trade visits and much more – first in the USA, then the Middle East and Africa, and in Brazil and India. This was essentially similar to being a tech ambassador for the UK government trade department

I really appreciated the opportunity that Bob gave me, as that also helped me develop my confidence in understanding cultures around the world, public speaking and coaching British companies that were trying to do business overseas.

In parallel, a former editor of EE Times, Richard Wallace, whom I had worked with before on the launch of TechOnline India, asked me to help him build a media property he’d developed – The Next Silicon Valley. Richard and I fed off each other’s expertise really well. And even though the business didn’t make a lot of money, it evolved into a strong global brand.

And then that brings me to 2017. I received a call from Jurgen Hubner, with EE Times, in the fall of that year, asking what I was up to. I said nothing. And so it was that I started freelancing for EE Times as a European correspondent, and thanks to the publisher at the time, Bolaji Ojo, I also assumed the role of editor-in-chief of embedded.com.

Credit goes to both Bolaji previously before he left, and today’s publisher of EE Times, Cyrus Krohn, for allowing me to continue my entrepreneurial ideas within EE Times and AspenCore, experimenting with new delivery methods like audio and video, building new programs within, like Silicon Grapevine, and helping to tell the industry’s stories as effectively as I can and as part of a strong small team.

Thank you to everyone who’s made me what I am today, and I hope to deliver on what is expected from me in my new role at EE Times, along with the rest of the team at Aspencore.