Gurtej Sandhu
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A brief biography
As in 2021 Jan
Swati Bharadwaj, January 27, 2021: The Times of India
Meet Gurtej Sandhu. He’s one of the most prolific inventors in the world. He holds over 1,350 US patents, more than the inventor of the electric bulb, Thomas Alva Edison (1,093 patents). And he was awarded IEEE’s prestigious Andrew S Grove award in 2018 for his contributions to the technology that is used to produce integrated circuits.
Gurtej was born in London to parents specialising in chemistry. The family moved to Punjab when Gurtej was three, and that’s where Gurtej grew up. He graduated in electrical engineering from IIT Delhi, and then did a PhD in physics from the University of North Carolina.
In December 1990, immediately after his PhD, he joined US chipmaker Micron Technology. And that’s where he still is. He is today senior fellow and vice president of advanced process technology, responsible for Micron’s R&D roadmaps. He has pioneered several process technologies being currently employed in mainstream semiconductor chip manufacturing. His work has enabled the continuation of Moore’s Law for aggressive scaling of memory chips integral to consumer electronics products and solid-state drives.
Gurtej is convinced it’s all karma. Working on memory chips was the last thing on his mind in his student days. “It was a series of small accidents and decisions that got me here. I felt it was too late for me to get into silicon as it was already a mature industry, and during grad school I was working on building a device using diamond as a substrate and that’s what I thought I wanted to do.”
But he ended up applying to Micron. “While browsing through an issue of IEEE Spectrum, I found an ad for a job at Micron, sent my resume and got selected. I realised later, it was a t wo year-old issue of the magazine.”
Micron was then a small company. A career in Intel, Texas Instruments or IBM was more tempting. But his physics professor, who was with IBM before joining academics, told him, “If you go to a large company, they’ll put you in a box.”
So Gurtej went to Micron, with a two-year plan. “But I was meant to work with Micron one way or the other because one of the companies that I had got an offer from, Texas Instruments, decided to exit the memory business which Micron ended up buying,” he says.
If you join a big company, he says, you sort of get lost in the crowd, but if you join a smaller company you can learn a lot.
