He completed his undergraduate program in Electronics and Communication Engineering in Government College of Technology, Coimbatore during which he was a part of a campus team that designed an Electronic Voting machine in the year 1981, which was actually the first designed in India.
He was on the faculty of the department of Computer Science and Automation (CSA) and the Supercomputer Education and Research Center (SERC) at the Institute.
While at IISc, he co-invented the Simputer, was awarded the Dewang Mehta Award for Innovation in IT, and pioneered the faculty entrepreneurship activity at IISc, which has since catalyzed similar activity in IITs and other educational institutes in India.
Swami Manohar has contributed to research in Computer graphics, visualisation, virtual reality and CAD for rapid prototyping.
Currently working on technologies for accessibility (improving the productivity of blind programmers) and IoT for emerging markets.