Pinoy at heart - and in circuitry

MANILA, Philippines - A Filipino-owned US company headquartered in Freemont, California in the heart of Silicon Valley is building the Philippine’s first microprocessor to be called the Rizal processor. Just what in the world is a processor and what can it do to the local tech industry?

The answer could be an intricate web infographic tracing the company’s beginnings in the US, its journey to the Philippines, and its vision of making a difference in both countries and the world.

There’s nothing grand about the vision, says Bitmicro vice president for Corporate Affairs Bobbet Bruce in a STARweek interview at its Philippine office in Taguig. “We want to build the Rizal processor as a commercially viable product that we can use in our own product line. It’s just going to be a regular processor but it is our own,” he says.

Because it is going to be locally developed with local talents and manufactured locally, it can be given at a preferential rate to local companies and universities that can use the technology to build their own devices, says Bruce. Certainly, it is going to be a plus factor in a highly price sensitive market.

But just what in the world is a processor? In non-tech lingo, a microprocessor is the heart of every computer or any device, whether it is a laptop, a netback, a server or a desktop. In tech terms it is also called the central processing unit (CPU) or a computation engine that make things work in a device.

BIT BY BIT: Bitmicro’s engineers get first-class training from the founders themselves.

Right now, in Bitmicro’s main product line of solid state drives for military and enterprise applications, it is the only component that is not locally made. Its flagship product – the E-Disk Altima solid state drive – has two controllers called the EDSA and LUNETA chips. Its next-generation products will also have the more advanced Isip and Talino chips. The company is on its way to making the product a completely Filipino device with the new processor.

Technology, however, is not the center of the Bitmicro story. It is the boundless love that weaves the typical Filipino family in the so-called “twin geographical spaces of the heart” – the home and the adopted country.

The Bruces are immigrants in America, part of the diaspora of the ’60s and ’70s. Bruce says all 16 brothers and sisters made their way to the US, studied there, established careers and built homes and families. All seven brothers became engineers and specialized in different engineering fields. Five of the brothers founded the company in the US in 1995.

“How we came about starting the company is because of my mother,” says Bitmicro president Rudy Bruce, son no. 5 and one of the founders of the company who was in town for the interview. “Before she died, she told my brother she was worried about us spreading all over the US. So we formed this company. The girls had their own idea – they set up a non-government organization called the Nanay Foundation.”

Jacinta Holgado Bruce indeed had reason to worry. With each child married with children and grandchildren, the Bruce clan is growing and will continue to grow and spread across America. The next generation will be even harder to track down. But with a tech company and an NGO where everybody can contribute, it keeps the family together, and it brought them back home.

The company’s high-tech facility in the Philippines boasts of state-of-the-art processes for making innovative products.

“Nanay Foundation is even more popular in the US than Bitmicro,” Rudy says. Nanay, the Filipino word for mother, is actually the acronym for National Alliance to Nurture the Aged and the Youth, a charitable organization made up of individuals who are committed to providing psychological, social, health, and emotional support for youth and elders 60 years of age or older.

Bitmicro, on the other hand, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Bitmicro Networks in the US. Building on the founders’ engineering background, the company designs microchips and makes ruggedized solid state storage for the military and industrial markets. It released its first product in 1999 and now has more than 300 customers in over 30 countries.

When it decided to bring its operations to the Philippines in 2002, it had only one reason: they are Filipinos.

“We need to sell the idea to our board of directors,” says Bobbet, a nephew of the founders. “While our company is founded by the brothers, it is run by an independent board, all industry experts. Does the Philippines have engineering talent that can support the operations? At that time, no. The only thing we can say is that we are Filipinos and we know the environment. We know that we can build talent here and build the operations from scratch.”

Of course, the lower cost is appealing but for an industry that relies so much on high-technology and high level of engineering design skills, what would drive the organization is results, not cost-effective solutions.

“Look at me, I’m brown,” Rudy Bruce laughs.

And so the founders did their homework. After setting up shop in the country with 10 engineers, they were running the company in the US by day and mentoring the recruits at night. Today, the company has a 180-strong workforce in both countries, 127 of its engineers or 75 of its workforce are dedicated to R&D. Displayed on the walls of its new office in Taguig were certificates of 23 patents issued in the US, Israel, Japan and China. Fifteen more are pending approval.

Bitmicro’s flagship product, the E-Disk Altima solid state drive.

“It is not that there are no talents in the Philippines or the universities are lacking in providing students with the right skill sets that Bitmicro has to take responsibility for training its employees,” explains Bitmicro executive Gilbert Cunanan. “The tech industry is an ecosystem, the schools provide training for the manpower needs of industries. For the longest time, the Philippines is focused on manufacturing. Chip and engineering design is a very new field here pioneered by Bitmicro and so the burden is on us.”

There are engineers in Bitmicro, he says, who have been with the company for seven or eight years, yet the learning process continues. And it will take many more years before they imbibe the full skill sets required.

Bobbet says that it is like building the foundations of a house one step at a time. One of its flagship projects in the Philippines is recruiting more engineering graduates to train with the company after graduation and possibly eventually work there. In fact, for the Rizal processor, Bitmicro needs a hundred engineering graduates.

The company is now defining the architecture for the Rizal processor and has set the timeline for finishing the project in 12 months and is now actively engaging with universities and students interested to pursue this specialization and to learn for free.

“We hope that our compelling story will also be compelling to our employees and people eager to learn and we would help them become better designers and engineers. We hope that we can provide that inspiration to build a better tech industry in the Philippines,” he says.

Bitmicro’s engineers a work on the intricacies of designing microchips.

In 1946, a Filipino-American immigrant poet so eloquently put words to what many Filipinos are doing to find their way back home: “I had come back to myself and my roots, here in this narrow strip of land. Back to my soil and to my father’s faith.”

Carlos Bulosan in his book “America is in the Heart” also wrote of his mother and home country as “the song of my dark hour.” For the Bruces and the millions of Filipinos in diaspora, there are many ways to say “The Philippines is also in the heart.”