T.J. Rodgers

T.J. Rodgers is founder, president, CEO, and a director of Cypress Semiconductor Corporation. He is a former chairman of the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) and sits on the board of di­rectors of high-technology companies, including Agiga Tech (nvRAMs), Bloom Energy (fuel cells), Cypress Envirosystems (energy-saving systems), and SunPower Corp. (advanced solar cells). He is a member of the board of Dartmouth College, his alma mater.

Rodgers was a Sloan scholar at Dartmouth, where he graduated as Salutatorian with a double major in physics and chemistry. He attended Stanford University on a Hertz fellowship, earning a master’s degree (1973) and a Ph.D. (1975) in electrical engineering. At Stanford, Rodgers invented, developed, and patented VMOS technology, which he sold for cash and royalties to American Microsystems Inc. (AMI). He managed the MOS memory design group at AMI from 1975 to 1979 before moving to Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), where he ran AMD’s static RAM product group from 1979-1982.

Rodgers founded Cypress Semiconductor Corporation in 1982. Since then, he has served as presi­dent, CEO and a director of the company, helping to build it into an international supplier of high-performance, mixed signal, programmable solutions with nearly 6,000 employees. Called “a quint­essential entrepreneurial company” by The Wall Street Journal, Cypress and its management team have received many awards for excellence in financial management. These include an Encore Award from the Stanford University Business School as entrepreneurial company of the year in 1988; an Entrepreneur of the Year award from the global consulting company, Ernst & Young, in 1991; three Bronze Awards and two Silver Awards from The Wall Street Transcript for outstanding manage­ment; and a Kachina Award from market-research company In-Stat Inc. for excellence in financial management. In 2005, Cypress was named one of the “100 Best Corporate Citizens” in the U.S. by Business Ethics magazine. In its October 2001 issue, Upside Magazine cited Rodgers as one of the “100 People Who Changed Our World.” Financial World magazine named Rodgers CEO of the Year in 1996. In 2002, Rodgers was named to a list of the year’s “Top 100 Chief Executives” by Chief Ex­ecutive magazine. In 2005, Rodgers was inducted into the Silicon Valley Engineering Council Hall of Fame. In 2006, he was honored with a Fellow Award from the International Engineering Consortium.

Rodgers’ contributions to a broad spectrum of national and international business and news publi­cations can be found on Cypress’s website at http://ceo.cypress.com.