A Publication for West Coast Alumni and Friends
Vol. 2, No. 2 / August 2003

From Confusion, Clarity of Purpose

"The social value of wireless technologies is found in improving daily life— in the workplace and at home."

When Ker Zhang was just a toddler, Chairman Mao's Red Guards trucked his parents, both physicians, from their home in Canton (now Guangzhon) to the countryside of the People's Republic of China to tend to the health of the farmers there. "I would see Mom and Dad three or four times a year," he says, "usually during the summer break from school and at the Chinese New Year."

His family situation grew more uncertain in 1966, the start of the decade known as the Cultural Revolution. "My mom was thrown in jail in 1967 for a few months," Zhang says. "It was a very confusing period."

While his younger sister, Janet, remained with his parents, Zhang, who today is CEO of VIA Telecom Inc., a privately held fabless semiconductor company in San Diego, was raised by his maternal grandmother, Lyan. "She is a truly strong woman," he says.

Zhang says he was fortunate to be in a city, where he could go to school, though he never graduated from high school in China. "It was a crazy situation," he says of his education, when he spent mornings studying the thoughts of Chairman Mao and afternoons working in the fields, while partisan fighting raged in the streets.

In 1978, two years after the official end of the Cultural Revolution, the best route to college admission meant being, as Zhang puts it, "a good Commie," which, he admits, he was not. So at 16, he and some of his knowledge-hungry friends formed a study group to tutor themselves for the nationwide college entrance exams. (He passed.)

With a bachelor's degree from Jinan University, Zhang came to the United States to further his education. His family joined him a few years later. His 91-year-old grandmother now lives with Zhang's uncle in Cupertino; his sister is a pharmacist in San Leandro. His mother is a nurse at a senior center in Oakland, where his father works as a pharmacologist.

In 1985, Zhang earned a master's degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, then, supported by a National Science Foundation research assistantship, came to WPI to work toward a Ph.D. He conducted research with Kaveh Pahlavan, professor of electrical and computer engineering and founder of WPI's pioneering Center for Wireless Information Networks, who urged him to consider a career in the nascent field of wireless communications.

After earning his doctorate in 1990, he held management and engineering positions with Eastern Communication (in Hangzhou, China), Microtek International, Motorola and Conexant. In 1997 he founded Synchronization Inc. and served as its CEO until 2001. He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

In his current post, most of Zhang's responsibilities involve business decision making—he no longer enmeshes himself in chip design, layout and simulations. With design centers in California (San Diego and Fremont) and China (Taipei and Hangzhou), VIA Telecom develops Code Division Multiple Access chipsets and a software development package.

"The social value of wireless technologies," Zhang says, "is found in improving daily life—in the workplace and at home." Then, perhaps recalling his childhood and his parents' "re-education" in the countryside of Chairman Mao's China, he pauses, and adds, "Wireless is especially valuable in remote areas."