News and Events
CITRIS News Coverage
TG Daily - Apple, Marvell and the promise of changing the world
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/42355/182/
Early on in Apple's life, Steve Jobs had a now famous meeting with John Sculley to recruit him to run Apple. John was running the second most powerful beverage company in the world, Pepsi, while Apple was arguably the number 3 or number 6 computer company (depending on where you put Digital Equipment, HP or Commodore). The phrase Steve used to convince John, who knew little about computers, was "do you want to spend the rest of your life selling colored water or do you want a chance to change the world?"
Marvell is actually demonstrating what it means to change the world and this came to me this week while at UC Berkeley attending an event at Sutardgja Dai Hall on CITRIS. Marvell's co-founder Weili Dai walked us through what she, Citris and Marvell are doing to change the world and make it a better place. This goes well beyond MP3 players and embraces broad concepts like energy conservation, developing students into change agents, sensor nets, and innovation sourced in non-traditional "street smart" education.
NBC Bay Area - Welcome to Tech School
http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Welcome-to-Tech-School.html
Marvell Technologies is an extremely successful microprocessor company. Even in this current recession, Marvell is still a seven billion dollar outfit, with products built in to the success of the tech industry around its Sunnyvale offices. Marvell's founders, Sehat Sutardja, Weili Dai, and Pantas Sutardja, all went to UC Berkeley (Weili met her future husband Sehat there), and are giving back in a big way.
Sutardja Dai Hall is a cool, modern building on the outside, but it's the inside that counts. A high-tech incubator for students and startups, the building has advisors, gadgets galore, and enough technology to re-start the entire tech boom. The gigantic semiconductor manufacturing fab doesn't hurt, either. It's probably the only one of its kind with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Reuters - CITRIS: An Incubator of Green Tech Innovation
http://www.reuters.com/article/gwmInnovationAndDesign/idUS307503209920090506
Weili Dai, a co-founder of Marvell, welcomed reporters to the tour, explaining why the center's mission is so important: Simply coming up with cool new gadgets for enterainment or information is "not sufficient; our next wave is how do we apply these great technologies to add value to human needs?" she said. The beauty of the projects underway at CITRIS, she said, is that "these innovations are not just good for the environment, they're good for the marketplace."
Case in point: the new Nano Lab at CITRIS headquarters is the latest incarnation of the Microfabrication Laboratory, which CITRIS director Paul Wright described as having provided technology support for 76 start-ups in the Bay Area in recent years, creating over a thousand jobs and bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and revenue to the area.
VentureBeat - UC Berkeley's CITRIS lab: A Haven for Startups Tries to Solve Big Problems
The CITRIS lab is housed in a new building funded in part by a $20 million donation from the founders of Marvell Technology Group — Sehat Sutardja, chief executive, his wife Weili Dai, co-founder, and Sehat's brother, Pantas Sutardja, chief technology officer. The nanofabrication facility comes with a clean room that has less than 100 specks of dust in a cubic foot of air. The wiring and plumbing is set up to be flexible, which is different from most corporate fabrication sites.
Dai said her company would stay closely involved in the lab, which is next door to the building where she met her husband as a Berkeley student. Born in Shanghai, Dai came to the U.S. to study and became a software programmer. She co-founded Marvell with her husband, an Indonesian immigrant, in 1995. Now they have thousands of employees, including 500 researchers in Shanghai. She says that researchers have to create new technologies that are simple and smartly designed for everyday use.
