The acquisition, being described as one of the largest deals in the electronics manufacturing industry, involved Solectron, a US firm that provides customized electronics manufacturing solutions, buying Smart Modular Technologies (SMART) for $2 billion in stock options. SMART was founded in 1987 by the husband-wife team of Ajay Shah and Lata Krishnan, who own some 25 per cent of the company. Another 15 per cent is held by their partner and friend Mukesh Patel, who also helped set up the highly rated company.

The deal is the secondbillion-dollar transaction involving Indians in recent weeks. Last month, the well-known tech monolith Cisco Systems bought an Indian-backed company Cerent in a $6.9 billion deal. Cerent was conceived by Indian entrepreneur Vinod Khosla, a founding partner in the venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, that has a 30 per cent stake in the company.

Khosla, 44, is also the brain behind telecom gear maker Juniper Networks and the Internet portal Excite, both of which are now billion-dollar ventures. He also helped found Sun Microsystems.

The deals have sent a frisson of excitement among the sizeable growing Indian techie community, which by some estimates numbers more than 300,000 in the United States. At last count, there were more than 100 prominent Indian-owned or backed hi-tech companies in the United States, with some 30 of them listed on the Nasdaq. The combined market cap of Indian-managed companies is said to run into nearly $40 billion, with the top 20 companies alone accounting for $ 28billion.

But the SMART and Cerent deals are what have caused a buzz in recent weeks, even as the gaggle of young entrepreneurs like Hotmail's Sabeer Bhatia and Epinion's Nirav Tolia are hacking through the wild forests of e-commerce. The Fremont, California-based SMART, an acronym for Surface Mount and Reflow Technology, is one of the industry's fastest growing makers of high density memory modules with a 1998 revenue of $714 million.

The company's founder, president and CEO, Ajay Shah was born in Uganda, but his family fled to India to escape the Idi Amin regime. Shah earned a B.S in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Baroda before moving to the United States, where he graduated from Stanford with a degree in engineering management.

The ``smarter'' partner to Shah's SMART is wife Lata Krishnan, 38, who was born in Kerala and studied in Jamshedpur and London, where she met Shah while at the London School of Economics. Krishnan, who is the co-founder and vice-president of the company, is saidto be the highest-compensated woman executive in Silicon Valley with a salary and stock options worth $3.9 million.

After six years with chipmaker Advance Micro Devices, Shah was working for Samsung when the company rejected his idea for building high-density memory modules. With his wife Lata and family friend Mukesh Patel, he raised $100,000 and got SMART. Within months, the company counted Compaq, Apple, IBM, H-P, Cisco and 3Com among its clients and was rated by Fortune magazine as one of the fastest growing companies in Silicon Valley.

Vinod Khosla, who turned an $8 million investment in Cerent into a $ 2 billion profit, is also a product of the Stanford business school after graduating from IIT.

There have been quite a few acquisitions of Indian-owned forms in recent months. While Sabeer Bhatia's sale of Hotmail to Microsoft for $400 million is a well-chronicled story, Virginia-based IIT graduate Hemant Kanakia sold his Torrent Technologies to Swedish giant Ericsson, also for $400 million.Both SMART and Cerent justified the acquisition of their companies, saying they could benefit from the expertise of the larger firms that took them in.

Industry veterans like Khosla and Shah are proving to be exemplars for a younger generation of Indian entrepreneurs who are working in the frontier areas of e-commerce.

In one of the most discussed ventures, a group of young Indian entrepreneurs have begun an e-commerce firm called Epinions which is already attracting notice because of the lightning speed at which the business was fired up. After selling Hotmail to Microsoft, pioneer Sabeer Bhatia too has gone in for an e-commerce start-up called Arzoo! Inc.