Tiju Jacob, a principal engineer at Intel India, strives to make technology that is affordable and reaches each element of humanity.Tiju Jacob joined Intel 18 years ago as a college graduate from a premier technical institute in the southern state of India. As Tiju says, “Intel was my dream career the day I joined the MTech program. I was not sure how I would make it happen, but as they say all dreams come true if you work hard and luck is on your side. I joined Intel in 2003.”
Tiju’s journey to becoming a principal engineer—a coveted career milestone highlighting technical prowess and professional excellence—started with that small dream of doing impactful work which created value for Intel.
He has spent two decades of his career at Intel in three different groups: Intel Communications Group, Intel Labs, and, currently, the Intel Core and Client Development Group. Tiju started his journey as a design automation engineer and as a principal Engineer, he is technically leading CPU Core execution in C2DG-India.
Tiju’s passion to be an engineer took a decisive turn when he joined Intel labs. Tiju got inspired by working with tech innovators who were leading minds in the industry. Under their guidance, Tiju sharpened his technical expertise and grew as a professional. Tiju led the Memory Controller Unit design for “Single Chip Cloud Computer”, an IA Tera scale research processor. Tiju steered cross-site execution between India and Germany. The last-minute feature could have delayed the project, should his team have encountered any surprises. However, detail orientation and result focus ensured the high-quality delivery in time for Tape-In. For this exemplary work, Tiju won Intel’s most prestigious honor—the Intel Achievement Award in 2009. This was a dream come true for Tiju, as this award recognizes the engineering excellence which every Intel employee aspires to achieve. His research work on this project has even found its way to projects today.
Tiju attributes his success to professionalism, hard work, passion, a focus on details, and the mindset to create an impact.
For the past 10 years, he has been working in CPU Core design and has seen many project generations. Intel significantly leads in both the Server and Client Microprocessor markets, and Tiju is proud of the fact he has been part of CPU Core design revolution on which world runs today. Now, when someone asks Voice Assistant, “How is the weather today?” the resulting prediction most likely comes from some of the CPU Core design developed by Intel—and Tiju’s work was a big part of making that happen.
Though awards were never his goal, Tiju has had an acclaimed career. For his technical excellence and contributions toward research and design, he was named Intel’s Principal Engineer in the Year in 2020. And in 2021, for his exemplary contribution toward speed and execution for the Rocket Lake Desktop processor, he was awarded his second Intel Achievement Award.
While there are still many places on earth where this technology hasn’t reached, Tiju is on a mission to change this, saying, “I aspire to see technology that is affordable and creates an impact in people’s lives, like health care, education, agriculture, infrastructure, space—areas which can make a high difference for humanity.”
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