Dobberpuhl was born in
Streator, Illinois on March 25, 1945. He graduated with a
Bachelor of Science degree in
electrical engineering from the
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1967. He worked as an engineer for the
Department of Defense until 1973 when he worked for
GE Integrated Circuits Laboratory in
Syracuse, New York, making
application-specific integrated circuits.
DEC In 1976 Dobberpuhl joined
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in
Hudson, Massachusetts as a semiconductor engineer and led teams designing microprocessors such as the
DEC T-11 and
MicroVAX. He rose to become one of five senior corporate consulting engineers, DEC's highest technical positions. As such, he led the teams designing the first three generations of the
DEC Alpha processor and in 1985 published a textbook called "The Design and Analysis of VLSI Circuits", described as "a leading text in the field." He founded and directed the company's
Palo Alto, California Design Center in 1993 where the
StrongARM architecture was designed.
SiByte Following the transfer of StrongARM to
Intel, in 1998 Dobberpuhl co-founded SiByte, where as president he led the design of the SB1250 64-bit
MIPS system on a chip processor, intended for high-performance networking applications. In 1998
EE Times named Dobberpuhl as one of the "40 forces to shape the future of the Semiconductor Industry". SiByte was funded by
venture capital, as well as large companies such as
ATI Technologies,
Cisco Systems, and
Juniper Networks, closing a third round of $40 million in funding in May 2000. Shortly after the company announced their SB1250 processor in August, Dobberpuhl stayed until 2003 as vice-president and general manager of the Broadcom broadband processor division. In 2003 the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers named him a recipient of the
IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits for "Pioneering design of high-speed and low-power microprocessors."
P.A. Semi Later in 2003 he left to found
P.A. Semi, a
fabless semiconductor company that designed the
PWRficient family of
Power ISA processors. He was elected to the
National Academy of Engineering in 2006 for "Innovative design and implementation of high-performance, low-power microprocessors." In 2008 P.A. Semi was sold to
Apple Inc. for a reported $278M USD. He received a Distinguished Alumni Award by University of Illinois in 2003, and the College Of Engineering Alumni Honor Award from the University of Illinois in May 2009.
Agnilux Dobberpuhl retired from Apple near the end of 2009, leaving to join the startup Agnilux, who were acquired by Google shortly afterwards in April 2010. He held 15 patents. He died at
Pacific Grove, California on October 26, 2019. == Works ==