Telecom & software in south asia 10

Atiq Raza passed high school [ St. Anthony’s & Aitchison College] in the late 1960’s from the old city of Lahore -a center for educational and cultural [ arts & film making ] excellence and dubbed as the Paris of India during the last days of British rule.

After getting a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics from University of London, Atiq flirted briefly with work at the Haripur R& D Labs of the Pakistan Telecoms Corp. before heading out to the US. After finishing his Master’s from Stanford University, where Vinod Khosla [ Sun Micro Systems and Kleiner Perkins & Caufield Byers - the venture capital company ] and he became friends. Atiq Raza worked at Amdhal Corporation and VLSI Corp. in the Silicon Valley , California .

Atiq then took on the colossal task of taking a handful of engineers at Nexgen [ a start-up company] and challenging the total dominance of Intel in the Microprocessors area. He describes it as a small army taking on the the forces of the Roman Empire . He went on to sell Nexgen for $ 800 million to AMD instead of an offer of 1.2 billion from the memory chip maker Micron. In 1999 he led AMD to successfully produce and market the K-6 processors. thereby breaking Intel’s monopoly of the microprocessor market in the world.

Working tirelessly on weekends and working hands -on to execute the early production problems, Atiq broke Intel’s hold by producing the world’s first 32- bit processors running at 1000 Mhz

Soon after that, Atiq Raza, calling the microprocessor an edge device, saw that the future lay in building chips for the broadband communications, especially the last mile problem. A problem that was being left unsolved by the Regional US Bell companies and causing the economy to slow down. Raza left AMD to start a new venture of his own in 1999.

Atiq Raza founded Raza Foundries and Raza Ventures as a special breed of venture capital company that has successfully pioneered a new concept in the Silicon Valley by taking a team of engineers and rapidly ramping /bringing their ideas to production and eventual buyout . In this way Raza ventures has established a new milestone in creating intellectual capital and value generation in the Silicon Valley .

Under Atiq Raza , Raza Foundries have built Pacific Broadband communications [ cable modem hardware - the last mile problem solution ] and Yuni Networks [ a Chinese husband and wife team] which was sold for $ 300 million to Applied Microcircuits in 2000. Storage area networks is another field that Raza Foundries is developing .

Atiq Raza also is guiding Pakistan’ efforts via the OPEN-US California Group to enter into the software market. Mr. Raza serves on the board of directors of AMCC, Maple Optical Systems, Nexsi Systems, Pacific Broadband Communications and several other private companies.

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