An Indian American has been earmarked as the youngest ever-IBM fellow with more than 300 patents and has been listed as the top ten living patent holders in the United States.
Ravi Arimilli is a researcher, based in Austin, Texas, who specialises in computer chip innards. His most recent patent issued on November 29 is for 'Layered local cache with lower level cache optimising allocation mechanism.'
In 2002 alone, Arimilli won 78 patents. That is, three patents every two weeks. He is pushing ahead as chief scientist on the 500-person Power 7 eServer development team.
Arimilli said he wants to make sure the innovation curve stays steep.
"We are going for a moon shot. The most fun part of my job is having the technical freedom to innovate and drive almost disruptive solution," he added.
In the list of most prolific living inventors, Americans are far behind other immigrants who are in the top ten living patent holders in the United States.
This is, notwithstanding, that Thomas Edison has been considered the nation's all-time most prolific inventor. He has 1,093 patents to his name, including the electric light bulb and phonograph.
More recently, Arimilli has been bested by Donald Weder, who in contrast to the stupendous impact of Edison, has mostly used his inventive powers to give the world better floral arrangements.
He has his name 1,321 patents to his credit.
Aside from Donald Weder, United States Patent and Trademark list of living prolific inventors on No 1 was Shunpei Yamazaki, whose work involves in computer and video screens and has 1,432 patents bearing his name. Yamazaki has averaged about a patent a week for 25 years.
The top ten living patent holders list includes six from Germany, and two from Japan. The only two Americans were flower guy Donald Weder and oil industry researcher Hartley Owen.
