Fadi Aboud: How Arab Professionals Are Transforming Israeli High-Tech

From personal experience to a social vision: role models are the key to change. During school vacations, Fadi Aboud would go to help his father. The 10-year-old boy would arrive with his father at the carpentry shop in Nazareth, watching, helping, and learning. "My father didn't know how to read and write, but he knew how to calculate," he says today, about 45 years later. "He did everything in his head, knew how to measure angles, design furniture, solve complex engineering problems almost without formulas and without a computer. Today I understand that he could have been an excellent engineer. He just didn't have the opportunity." Aboud, unlike his father, managed to find the opportunity, and since then has been trying to give it to more and more people.

He studied electrical engineering at the Technion, joined Intel about 30 years ago, and today, at age 56, he is what is called a Fellow, a technological rank in the company equivalent to a vice president. He manages a global system of hundreds of engineers, leads one of the critical areas in Intel's processor development, is responsible for performance, with an emphasis on the power consumption of the processors, and is at the heart of the company's attempt to return to the forefront of the global chip industry. At the same time, as one of the most senior Arab high-tech professionals in Israel, he is one of the most prominent activists for expanding the integration of this population into the worlds of technology.

The Path to Technology

He arrived at this almost by accident. As a child, in the early eighties, high-tech was not around, certainly not in Arab society. Aboud did see educated people around him — doctors, teachers, civil engineers — but mainly craftsmen. "I didn't have technological models to look up to," he explains in an exclusive interview, the first in his life, for "Calcalist Magazine." "I myself arrived at technology by accident — and thanks to a priest. I studied at St. Joseph High School, and the priest who managed it decided to open an electronics track. When I think about it today, I understand what vision he had. It was in 1983, who even thought then about electronics as a profession of the future?".

Aboud studied in the first class of the track, loved the field, and decided to continue to the Technion. His carpenter father and kindergarten teacher mother didn't really know where all this was going. "There were no examples of this. The few in our society who studied electrical engineering became teachers, or left abroad. There were no other examples. So my father asked me what one even does with electrical engineering. I didn't have an answer. But the parents told me: 'Do what you think is right.' And it was important to them that I study. They supported me in every way, even financially, even without knowing what one does with it."