Inside Applied Materials, Marvell Technology India, and Cisco India

• Business: supplies manufacturing equipment for semiconductor chip production worldwide
• Scale: grew from one hundred workers to thirty thousand workers over several decades
• India presence: investing in a new centre in Bangalore

Mr. Avinash Avula described his own career path to the students, explaining that career journeys rarely follow a straight line:

• Completed a master’s degree in the United States
• Joined the semiconductor industry for more than four years
• Felt the work was too technical and not visible enough in external impact
• Left the industry and pursued a business degree
• Worked as a management consultant with fashion, banking, and healthcare clients and then returned to the semiconductor industry, where he currently serves as Country President.
• He quoted studies are as important as anything else, and if you too wish to follow your calling, explore Engineering Courses after 12th.

When the students asked what the biggest problem facing Applied Materials is today, most expected an answer about geopolitics, trade laws, or competition. He deliberated –

“If you use a normal search engine to search for something, it requires a small amount of energy. But if you ask a smart chat tool the same question, the chat tool (example – LLM tool) requires thirteen times more energy. If we do not fix this power problem, the world will run out of energy very soon.”

He quoted these 3 learnings –

• Solve easy problems and nobody will pay you well, because anyone can solve them
• Solve the hardest problems and the entire world will find you valuable
• Look for the hardest problems deliberately, not accidentally
• If you’re an allied science enthusiast, delay not and explore Bachelors & Masters Courses in Applied Sciences, Parul University.

He even shared a story about a young team member who wanted a week off to visit a friend in another country.

“A good leader cares about the output, not just the hours sitting in an office.”

His session has inspired many students and in result, they’ve written heartfelt experiences on LinkedIn.

Mr. Vikash Mishra’s LinkedIn Post on Applied Materials

Mr. Prashwet Khobragade’s LinkedIn Post on Applied Materials

One of the most instructive moments of the session was Mr. Navin Bishnoi‘s explanation of why Marvell sold its automotive Ethernet business. The decision was purely economic:

• Automotive industry growth rate: 8 to 10 percent per year
• Artificial intelligence and data centre growth rate: 18 to 30 percent per year
• Automotive markets measured in billions of US dollars
• Artificial intelligence and data centre markets measured in trillions of US dollars
• If you’re equally passionate about software development, artificial intelligence and quantum computing, delay not and enrol into Bachelor of Technology in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science at Parul University.

Mr. Bishnoi gave the students numbers that put the hidden complexity of artificial intelligence into perspective:

• One Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), the core of AI computation, consumes approximately 800 watts of electricity
• Training a single large AI model requires between 100,000 and 200,000 GPUs
• Each GPU costs approximately 30,000 US dollars
• Large Language Models have approximately ten to the power twelve (10^12) parameters
• Approximately fifty percent of computing time is spent on data transfer between chips rather than on processing

Ms. Aisha Nagina’s LinkedIn Post on Applied Materials

Mr. Bishnoi emphasised that the semiconductor industry is one of the most complex engineering domains because it requires knowledge across several disciplines simultaneously:

• Electrical engineering
• Computer science
• Physics
• Chemistry
• Mechanical engineering

Three principles that Parul University students documented from the session:

• Bloom where you are planted: do your best in whatever situation you find yourself in
• Say ‘yes, if’ rather than ‘no, but’: approach problems with a solution orientation rather than an objection orientation

Head here to read what Mr. Vikash Mishra’s LinkedIn Post on Marvell Technology and Aerospace Visit says. He shared how experiencing this has helped him with a sheer clarity in strategic leadership & operational excellence.

Ms. Daisy Chittilapilly is the President of Cisco India and SAARC, and one of the senior-most women leaders in Indian technology.

Her philosophy is very simple – be like a sponge. The central message from Ms. Chittilapilly was about the discipline of absorbing learning from every source:

“Be like a sponge, absorb everything. Failure is not the end, it is the beginning of new opportunities. Either you win or you learn.”

Ms. Kangkana DasBaruah and Mr. Vikash Mishra independently captured and listed similar principles from the Cisco session:

• Always seek and be open to new opportunities
• Focus on growth year over year, both personal and organisational
• Transform innovative ideas into reality

Ms. Kripa Patel’s LinkedIn Post on Applied Materials

Ms. Kangkana Das Baruah’s LinkedIn post specifically highlighted the importance of meeting Ms. Chittilapilly is a senior woman leader in a global technology company.

Ms. Indrani Sahoo’s post emphasised the perfect blend of management leadership and technology environment at Cisco. Mr. Vikash Mishra’s post documented the technology showcase during the visit, describing Cisco’s work in Internet of Things, cybersecurity, videoconferencing, and hybrid work ecosystems. Head here to read the experiences of Parul University’s students –

1. Kangkana DasBaruah’s LinkedIn Post on Cisco
2. Vikash Mishra’s LinkedIn Post on Cisco

The content of the three sessions maps directly to multiple programmes offered at Parul University and leading to Parul University Placements (3,500 plus offers) –

• B.Tech Computer Science and Engineering: covers the software and computational foundations that semiconductor and networking infrastructure supports
• B.Tech Information Technology, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning: directly connects to the GPU economics and large language model scale discussed by Mr. Navin Bishnoi
• B.Tech Electronics and Communication Engineering: relevant to the chip design and optical networking transition discussed at Marvell

Ms. Indrani Sahoo’s LinkedIn Post on Cisco