You probably haven’t thought about your chipset lately—but if you were missing it, you would notice. Dado Banatao, who was born in 1946 in a Filipino farming village that lacked electricity, was the designer behind the first PC chipset. (For the uninitiated, a chipset acts as command central for all the components of a motherboard. This makes sure they can all communicate with each other.)
From a farming village to engineering
Banatao’s father was a rice farmer, but unlike many others in his community, he didn’t stop his son’s education at a young age for agriculture. Instead, he sent his son to a Jesuit boarding school far away from their village. Banatao was an excellent student and went on to the Mapúa Institute of Technology in Manila, where he fell in love with engineering.
Careers in engineering were not plentiful in the Philippines, so Banatao moved to the United States in 1968 to work for Boeing as a design engineer. He met his future wife, Maria Cariaga, while taking continuing education classes at the University of Washington, and the couple eventually landed at Stanford University, where Banatao earned a master’s in electrical engineering.
Making his mark on Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley would remain their home as Banatao became a major player in the seminconductor and PC industries, taking on roles at National Semiconductor, Commodore International, Intersil, and SEEQ Technology. His work at Commodore included contributions to one of the first mass-market PCs, the PET computer.
Banatao co-founded S3, where he became a pioneer in meeting the rapidly developing need for graphics acceleration in PCs. He credited his success throughout his career to doing things others wouldn’t do — like reading IBM’s code line by line.
Banatao passed away Dec. 25, 2025, in Palo Alto.
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