Ravi Arimilli is the Big Daddy of inventions and innovations in the world of high-tech research. The Indian-born technie was awarded a whopping 53 patents in 2003—nearly one every week—to add to the nearly 200 patents he has won for IBM, including a record 78 last year. For the 11th year running, the U.S. Patent Office last week declared IBM to be undisputed leader among companies undertaking patent producing research worldwide, awarding the company popularly known as Big Blue a record 3,415 patents in 2003.

Within Big Blue itself, Arimilli, a technocrat-engineer at its Austin facility, came out tops. “It’s gratifying to be awarded so many patents so consistently, but the real credit should go to IBM, which fosters enterprise and risk taking,” Arimilli said in an interview last week, speaking in slangy, rapid fire American English far removed from Telugu, the only language he knew when he came to the U.S. as a six-year old in 1969.

His brother Baba Arimilli, who works alongside him at IBM, is not far behind. He won 13 patents in 2003. Between them, the brothers’ 66 patents represented more than 10 per cent of the Austin IBM patent output for the entire year.

Over the past decade, IBM has won over 25,000 patents, nearly triple the total of any U.S. tech competitor. Engineers and researchers of Indian origin have fueled the company's surge. IBM’s patent portfolio is said to generate an average of more than $1 billion in intellectual-property royalties annually.

But Ravi Arimilli has no regrets signing it all over to IBM instead of heading out to become a billionaire himself. “The fact is I am at heart an inventor and an engineer, not a money maker,” he says.

As IBM’s supergeek, he gets to bash ideas with people like Linus Torvalds , author of the Linux kernel, and Tim Berners-Lee , inventor of the World Wide Web, something he doubts he could have done as an individual.

The Arimillis are IBM's leading experts on symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) system structures, cache/memory hierarchies and system bus protocols.