``I had not even used a calculator in India,'' he laughingly told IANS, but computer electronics was a burgeoning and attractive field for this young man who ``really liked the education system here because it was based on what and how much you understand and not on memory.'' Ironically, as much as he tried to escape memorising, today Agarwal's chips merge logic and memory on a single platform. Historically, separate chips were needed to carry the processing and data. Agarwal and his team ofsix engineers, created a single chip to carry both logic and data.

After completing his masters in Illinois in 1977, Agarwal took his first job in Houston, Texas, in a medical devices company making pacemakers. He then moved to Washington, with General Electric, only to decide soon that creativity and big money lay in Silicon Valley. He joined Cirrus Logic in 1984 and worked there till 1993. NeoMagic began in 1993. ``People had talked about our kind of chip, but nobody had tried it because there were so many technical challenges.'' But Agarwal and his colleagues, mostly from Cirrus Logic, approached investors who ``liked our team and said `let's go','' Agarwal recalls. The company put its first chips in the market in 1995 when it sold about $200,000. In 1996, it had sales worth $41 million, in 1997, $124 million and last year, $240 million.

Now there are 275 other people working in the firm, which has offices in India (at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur), Israel, Manchester, Taiwan, Hong Kong,Tokyo, and Austin, Texas. The main office is in Santa Clara, California. is to keep the major market share that it has captured with the Q3 chip in the notebook PC market where it has 57 per cent of the market share. NeoMagic counts virtually every major manufacturer of notebook PCs as customers including Compaq, Dell, Gateway, Hewlett- Packard, IBM, Mitsubishi, NEC, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba. The company went public in March 1997 and has been awarded honours by the Fabless Semiconductor Asociation for the past three years. In June 1998, Agarwal was awarded the Ernst & Young `Entrepreneur of the Year Award,' in the High Technology-Electronics category. Today, Agarwal says, his company is looking to leverage its chip to work with digital cameras and digital versatile video (DVV), two new market areas. ``Market opportunities are huge -- in digital cameras, around $2 billion and DVV, about $3 billion,'' Agarwal estimates.

NeoMagic recently started a collaboration with the IIT, Kanpur, which Agarwal says has thebest computer science programme in India. ``We wanted to take advantage of the resources in India,'' he says. NeoMagic works on the software side with IIT and trains students in progamme writing for NeoMagic chips.

In Silicon Valley, where Agarwal lives with his wife Geeta, and their two daughters Neha (16) and Richa (13), he admits that sometimes he feels deprived of his family's company. ``All I want them (my daughters) to do is get the best from our (Indian) culture and this (American) culture and find the best of what they would like to see,'' he says. When he came to the US, he says, he had a net worth of only $8 and some help from his sister who was residing in the US. ``I tell them (daughters), if I can do it, you guys can do it too,'' he says.