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Amid the steadily increasing talk about Moore’s Law of transistor scaling hitting the wall, Marvell co-founder and CEO Sehat Sutardja presented the idea of modular chips (MoChi) at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in 2015. This eventually culminated into what’s now widely known as chiplets.
He later discussed the idea of these daisy-chain multiple chips with AMD’s CTO Mark Papermaster, who thought the name was too complicated, calling them chiplets. Sehat’s passion and dedication to cobbling different pieces of silicon into a single package eventually led him to cofound the first chiplet foundry Silicon Box in 2021.
Sehat Sutardja, co-founder of Marvell and Silicon Box and investor and backer of several semiconductor startups, passed away on 18 September 2024. He was known as one of the pioneers of the modern semiconductor industry. “I am a bit narrow-minded. I only see things in terms of electronics,” he was quoted in a profile story, “Sehat Sutardja: An Engineering Marvell,” published in IEEE Spectrum in October 2010.
Born in a Chinese family in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1961, he was drawn to the wonders of electronics early in his childhood. While in sixth grade, he visited his younger brother Pantas Sutardja, who lived with their grandparents in Singapore. During this time, he got hold of Pantas’ hobbyists DIY books and magazines and was fascinated by the idea of building a Van de Graaff generator. The two siblings ended up developing a crude but functioning device.
From Van de Graaff generator to storage chips
When back in Jakarta, Sehat started building a miniature version of the Van de Graaff generator. After a little research at a bookstore, he discovered that the improved device would require replacing mechanical switches with transistors. That led him to a nearby radio shop, and in a year or so, he’d received a radio repair license.
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Figure 1 Sehat was very fond of the radio repair license he received at the tender age of 13; his wife kept a copy in her purse in case he wanted to show it to people. Source: Marvell
While playing with transistors, he often encountered company names such as Fairchild, National Semiconductor, Motorola, and Texas Instruments. These were all U.S. companies, which led to his inclination toward studying in the United States. A friend of his brother was enrolled at the University of San Francisco, and that connection took him there in the summer of 1980.
What happened next clearly shows Sehat’s intimate bond with electronics. After disacovering that the university doesn’t have electrical engineering program, he moved to Iowa State University and earned his bachelor’s in electrical engineering in 1983. Then he moved to the University of California, Berkley, where he completed his master’s in 1985 and Ph.D. in 1988 in electrical engineering and computer science.
That’s where he also met his wife, Weili Dai, who was a computer science major. Sehat began his professional career as an analog circuit designer with two Bay Area companies: Micro Linear and Integrated Information Technology. At Micro Linear, he worked on digital-to-analog converters (DACs) and other chips for hard disk drives (HDDs).
Next, at Integrated Information Technology, he worked on circuits for digital video compression and decompression, a technology that ended up in AT&T’s infamous VideoPhone. Meanwhile, his wife Weili wanted them to start their own company, so in 1995, they founded Marvell Technology Group along with Sehat’s brother Pantas Sutardja. The name Marvell came from their quest to create “marvelous” things; it ended with “el” following the names of successful tech companies like Intel, Novell, and Nortel.
Birth of Marvell
Pantas, who had recently left IBM’s Almaden Research Center, had worked on hard drive technology at IBM. That, combined with Sehat’s stint at Micro Linear and expertise in mixed-signal chips, led them to develop digital read channels for hard disk drives. At that time, analog read channels from companies like Infineon, STMicroelectronics, and TI depended on amplitude peaks to decode HDD data.
On the other hand, digital technology could utilize the newly arrived CMOS technology scaling to define bit patterns on a hard disk track. So, Marvell used high-speed sampling and DSP filtering to introduce digital read channels that significantly increased disk drive data densities. That put TI out of read-channel business.
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Figure 2 Weili Dai, Sehat Sutardja, and Pantas Sutardja founded Marvel in February 1995 with their savings and money from Weili’s parents. Source: IEEE Spectrum
They had working chips by Christmas 1995, and Seagate became Marvell’s first customer. Marvell has dominated the disk drive controller market since then. The timing was impeccable from two standpoints. First, the fabless design movement was just taking off, and Marvell became one of the early success stories in the emerging fabless semiconductor business model.
Second, by adopting CMOS technology for its debut chip for a hard disk drive, Marvell became one of the early adopters and beneficiaries of the historic transition from bipolar to CMOS chip manufacturing. Marvell followed the CMOS-centric approach on other products like Ethernet switches and transceivers to create faster and more power savvy chips.
However, Marvell and Sehat kept a relatively low profile while laser focused on the company’s product and technology roadmaps. Sehat, known as humble and down to earth, didn’t make splashes in trade media like many other founders and CEOs of successful chip companies.
Then, in 2016, Marvell’s intensely quite world was hit by an accounting scandal. Though president and CEO Sutardja and his wife, Dai, chief operating officer, were cleared of any financial misconduct, the pressure on sales teams to meet revenue targets led both Sutardja and Dai to leave their respective positions. Sutardja remained the chairman of the board.
The chiplets man
In the aftermath of this accounting investigation, Sutardja and Dai remained highly respected in semiconductor industry circles. After turning a scrappy little startup into a formidable semiconductor outfit, the husband-wife duo had engaged in over dozen startups, including Alphawave and DreamBig.
They also co-founded a specialized fab built around chiplet and advanced packaging technologies. Silicon Box, after building a fab in Singapore, is setting up another chiplet fab in Northen Italy to better serve European chip companies.
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Figure 3 Sehat Sutardja, known for his humility, kindness and generosity, made significant gifts to the University of California, Berkeley. He is seen here with his wife and two sons at the grand opening of UC Berkeley’s Sutardja Dai Hall on 27 February 2009. Source: University of California, Berkeley
Sehat’s focus on chiplets shows his foresight on the future of semiconductors. To express his relationship with semiconductor technology and how it kept him going, he once said, “I don’t know anything else.”
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