Dr. Vinod Agarwal
Founder, President and CEO, SemIndia
Dr. Vinod K. Agarwal, Founder, President and CEO, SemIndia, Inc. Dr. Agarwal has made a rare transition from a distinguished researcher to a notable entrepreneur.
Dr. Agarwal was a faculty member with McGill University , Montreal . Over a fourteen year period, he put McGill on the global map as the top university for excellence in research and teaching in semiconductor testing. In the process he co-authored and published more than 100 research papers, was appointed as an endowed Nortel/NSERC Industrial Research Chair Professor, and elected to be a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (IEEE). He also served as a consultant to Nortel Networks, Hitachi, Ltd. and Eastman Kodak Company for developing their semiconductor test environment. Dr. Agarwal was also a founding member of Canadian Microelectronics Corporation and Micronet.
Dr. Agarwal founded LogicVision in 1992 and was President and CEO until 2003 and Chairman until 2005. He secured close to $100M through private and public funding for LogicVision, leading through an IPO process that started just before 9/11 and finished on October 31, 2001. Innovations pioneered by Dr. Agarwal and his team at LogicVision have resulted in over 100 filed and granted patents world-wide. With customers such as Intel, Sun Microsystems, LSI Logic, Sony, Matsushita, Broadcom, Agere and Cisco, LogicVision has become the standard for embedded test. He was honored as “Entrepreneur of the Year” in 2002 by SiliconIndia.
With SemIndia, Inc., Dr. Agarwal and his colleagues, have a new enterprise to create “Semiconductors Made in India ”. Due to the explosion of electronics consumption in India , semiconductor manufacturing has become a highly attractive investment opportunity in India . Conceived as a public-private partnership, SemIndia plans to create a Fab City and its first anchor fab in India by 2007. Dr. Agarwal is Chief Advisor to India Semiconductor Association.
Dr. Agarwal received a B.E. (Hons.) from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, in 1973, and a Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University , Baltimore in 1977.
