The Sikh Scientist With More Patents Than Thomas Edison
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Gurtej Singh Sandhu was born in London to parents from India. He studied electrical engineering in India before coming to the United States to pursue a doctorate in physics at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Sandhu was interested in integrated circuits — electronic circuits formed on a small piece of semiconducting material. As his graduate study neared its end in 1989, his technical skills were in demand. He weighed two job offers. One came from Texas Instruments, then the top American computer memory maker. The other came from Micron Technology, an 11-year-old upstart in Boise struggling against government-subsidized memory-chip makers in Japan and other countries.
He joined Micron for the freedom to solve all kinds of engineering problems. In Boise, he worked to sustain something called Moore’s Law. In 1965, Intel cofounder Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors on a unit of area in an integrated circuit was doubling every year. Sandhu found ways to cram more memory cells onto chips and make them more efficient. He racked up patent after patent. “The technical complexity of what we need to do today is exponentially more difficult” than it was when he started, Sandhu said.
He also has been giving back to Boise State University by mentoring engineering majors and faculty alike for 15 years. “Henhas tremendous humility, in particular given the scale of impact that he’s had,” said the director of the university’s Micron School of Materials Science and Engineering.“And he has his finger on the pulse of emerging technology and emerging memory on the global scale.”
“The key to innovation, is to make it (technology) more affordable so everybody can use it.”