Suhas Patil
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Suhas S. Patil, born 1944 in Jamshedpur, Jharkhand, India, is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, venture capitalist and philanthropist. He founded the company Cirrus Logic a fabless semiconductor company.
He received his bachelor's degree in engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and MSEE and PhD from MIT.
Patil 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 from 1997. He is the Chairman of Digité, Inc., which was earlier named Tufan Infotech and is also Chairman of the Board of Cradle Technologies. He also serves on the boards of The Tech Museum and the World Affairs Council of Northern California.
Patil 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. Patil is an angel investor in numerous start-ups, like Vitalect.[1]
Academia
Patil received his bachelor's degree in engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. From 1970 until 1975, Patil 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.
He was an associate professor of computer science at the University of Utah College of Engineering from 1975 to 1980, where he started the VLSI group and worked on design methodology for complex integrated circuits.
As a gift to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Patil awarded $1.5 million for the construction of the Suhas and Jayashree Patil Conference Center at the Stata Center. Patil said in reference to his gift, "The Stata Center is an interdisciplinary facility. To do cutting-edge research that influences society, we need to span several fields. The hallmark of a great institution is it attracts great people who work together. We wanted our gift to support this kind of place."