Sehat Sutardja (1961 - 2024)
Sehat Sutardja left us too soon.
News of the sudden death of Sehat Sutardja, Marvell co-founder, this week sent a shock wave through the electronics industry.
I’m still adjusting.
My friend Michael Kanellos at Marvell Technology wrote a fine obituary of Sehat on Marvell’s website. Speaking with him, we agreed that Sehat truly belongs to the last generation of semiconductor industry CEOs.
Sehat was down to earth, keenly interested in technologies, willing to speak his mind, always humble and generous with his time.
He didn’t spout talking points.
My last face-to-face with him was in February, when Intel launched Intel Foundry.
While the old Intel was trying to reboot its manufacturing heritage as “IDM 2.0,” the independently wealthy Sehat had the audacity to launch his own foundry
By that time, Sehat had been a co-founder and board chairman of Silicon Box, a bold new foundry based in Singapore designed for chiplet production.
While the old Intel was trying to reboot its manufacturing heritage as “IDM 2.0,” the independently wealthy Sehat had the audacity to launch his own foundry, dedicating his energies to get chiplets off the ground.
The 2.5D or 3D architecture of chiplets leverages one of Sehat’s contributions to the industry, an interconnect technology called MoChi (short for Modular Chip). Sehat discussed MoChi in his keynote at ISSCC in 2015. When first unveiled, MoChi was described as being based on the ARM AXI link running at 8 Gbits/second or faster to keep chip-to-chip latency low. The idea was to enable daisy-chain multiple chips and use micro-serdes and low-swing differential signaling. This became a key building block of today’s chiplets.
Sehat didn’t say “chiplet” then. But when he brought his MoChi idea to Mark Papermaster at AMD, Papermaster said, “Sounds too complicated … How about calling it a chiplet?” Chiplet was the term that Dave Patterson used in his paper.
Bringing different pieces of silicon in a single package in which all pieces behave as one became Sehat’s quest and obsession. He didn’t just publish papers and advocate at technical confabs. Together with his wife Weili Dai, he escalated his chiplet brainstorm all the way to manufacturing and packaging. This led to founding Silicon Box in 2021.
Sehat and Weili were both forced out of Marvell amid an internal accounting investigation in 2016. But they remained titans in the semiconductor industry, deeply respected and widely praised both by peers and rank-and-file engineers.
Sehat was always the engineers’ engineer. He once explained to me that obsessing about unresolved technical problems has been a lifelong habit, “since I was 12 years old.”
During an interview in 2015, Sehat, who started his career as an analog circuit engineer, told me, “I still think about how to build a better A-to-D converter. I work on my new ideas at night, sometimes call a professor, and discuss the issue.”
The MoChi idea was one of Sehat’s most fertile passions. I once called him “Marvel’s Tinker at The Top.”
He never stopped tinkering.
While doing his CEO day job at Marvell, he used personal time, at night and on weekends in his garage, thinking about the metamorphosis of MoChi before sharing it with his team at Marvell. He never stopped being a hands-on engineer.
Chiplet startup ecosystem
Another memorable facet of Sehat was his generosity and kindness. Once at CES, I saw him on the escalators (as he was going up and I was going down). In passing, I said, “I’ve got a question!” Instead of playing the familiar role of frazzled CEO and brushing me off, he waited upstairs and accommodated me with a newsy five-minute chat — one reporter to one CEO.
More important were his relationships with countless startups. At the last CES, I stumbled into a large meeting room reserved by Sehat and Weilie for more than a dozen startups in which they’ve invested. Among the group, showcasing technologies and products, were Silicon Box, Zerro, DreamBig, Nubis, Expedera, Alphawave, BlueCheetah, LeapFrog, FLC, Ventana, Aviva, Ramen, Bolt, Avaturn, Wonderland, Story Machine, Danger Devices and MeetKai.
I realized that some of these companies are developing new building blocks for a still fledgling chiplet ecosystem, and a lightbulb glowed above my head.
We tend to picture tech billionaires retiring to spend their fortunes on yachts and villas, with a few leftover bucks for a favorite social cause. But here were Sehat and Weili staying true to their school, spending time and money to create an “ecosystem” that could support and fast-track chiplets to the commercial market.
Sehat knew that a big idea needs big bucks, big heart and tireless efforts. To that cause, he dedicated his life.
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Junko Yoshida is the editor in chief of The Ojo-Yoshida Report. She can be reached at [email protected].
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