It was time to repay his debt to his teachers and alma mater. Last month Ajay Marathe, president of chip vendor AMD in India, and more fondly remembered by his teachers as a naughty but studious backbencher, set up a full-fledged PC lab in King George School in Mumbai. Though he invested in this initiative out of personal interest, AMD and its OEM partners will soon expand this “PC lab in schools” concept to schools across India.

Marathe's enthusiasm underscores AMD's resurgence and newly acquired reputation as a company that has the potential to chip away market share away from ace rival Intel with its Opteron server processors. “Gone are the days when we were seen as bad copycats of the silicon industry. Now we are trying to prove ourselves in the market place.”

He is visibly proud about being part of the cultish, driven and “green-blooded” company. Marathe who joined the AMD headquarters in Sunnyvale after his MS in industrial engineering from Texas Tech in 1984, has seen the highs and lows of the company. He admits he joined the company due to circumstances than out of choice. While his American classmates in his batch opted for job offers from Texan oil firms and defence companies, Marathe who did not have a green card, had to make do with a facilities engineering job at AMD in California.

The '80s were an exciting time to be in Silicon Valley. Besides engineering and design, high-tech companies in the area also had manufacturing facilities in the Valley. Marathe's initial assignment in facilities engineering was his ticket to manufacturing sites where he designed wafer fabs and clean water systems. Two years later he got into manufacturing.

The Valley saw tumultuous and depressing times in the mid-80s when Japanese companies started dumping cheap technologies and products putting American tech companies out of business. Recalling those troubled times, Marathe said that it was quite depressing to watch AMD come within shouting distance ($970 million) of $one billion in revenues and then plumb into a deep recession.

By 1990, the company had shifted manufacturing to Penang in Malaysia and Marathe played an active role in overseeing the technology transfer and operations. He managed the Penang operations sitting out of the US, and was responsible for the gamut of work from process recipes, logistics, planning, supply chain to automation and financial metrics.

Marathe is quite modest about his achievements. When Hector Ruiz took over as CEO from Jerry Sanders in 2000, he looked to change matters and set right the kinks and problems at AMD. The company then was struggling two generations behind Intel and Ruiz assumed that the problem lay with manufacturing, which was Marathe's domain.