Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer and Director
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 1980 before moving to Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), where he ran AMD's static RAM product group until 1982.
Dr. Rodgers' U.S. patents include: US7045387 - Method of performing back-end manufacturing of an integrated circuit (2006); US6903002 - Low-k dielectric layer with air gaps (2005); US6847218 - Probe card with an adapter layer for testing integrated circuits (2005); US6835616 - Method of forming a floating metal structure in an integrated circuit (2004); US6730545 - Method of performing back-end manufacturing of an integrated circuit device (2004); US6185126B1 - Self-initializing RAM-based programmable device (2001); US6131140 - Integrated cache memory with system control logic and adaptation of RAM bus to a cache pinout (2000); US5977638 - Edge metal for interconnect layers (1999); US5835401- DRAM with hidden refresh (1998); US4764248 - Rapid thermal nitridized oxide locos process (1988); US4222063 - VMOS Floating gate memory with breakdown voltage lowering region (1980); US4222062 - VMOS Floating gate memory device (1980); US3975221 - Low capacitance V groove MOS NOR gate and method of manufacture (1976); US3924265 - Low capacitance V groove MOS NOR gate and method of manufacture (1975) and US3878552 - Bipolar Integrated Circuit and Method (1975).
Rodgers was the founding CEO of Cypress in 1982 and has since built 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 has testified before Congress five times. A proponent of free markets, he twice advocated the elimination of corporate subsidies in testimony before the House Committee Ruling on Science, Space, and Technology, presenting to the committee in 1993 and 1991. Rodgers again condemned corporate subsidies in 1997 at hearings by a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs. In a similar vein, in 1990, he argued against antitrust exemption for the U.S. Memories cartel in testimony before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Economic and Commercial Law. In a presentation to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1998, Rodgers supported a proposal to raise the ceiling on the number of electronics engineers permitted to enter the U.S. on special visas, maintaining that the influx of talent increased the competitive advantage of U.S. high-technology companies. Rodgers' testimony-along with his contributions to a broad spectrum of national and international business and news publications is available on the Cypress website at http://ceo.cypress.com.
Rodgers has been cited for his achievements in supporting the philosophy of capitalism and freedom, and for his contributions to philanthropic and other nonbusiness groups. In 2001, Rodgers received the Silicon Valley Capitalism Award for "exemplifying the virtues of capitalism and defending capitalism with ethical principles in the media." Also that year, Rodgers was presented with an Angel Award by the International Angel Investors organization for his venture-capital activities supporting the semiconductor industry, and the inaugural Entrepreneur of the Year Award from the Smith Center for Private Enterprise Studies at California State University at Hayward. He joined a short list of scholars, including Milton Friedman, in receiving an Honorary Degree in Social Sciences from the University of Guatemala for his numerous essays on the topics of capitalism and freedom. He received an Outstanding Individual Entrepreneurship Award from the U.S. Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship in 1997, and the City of Santa Clara, California named him Entrepreneur of the Year in 1986.
Rodgers has been a passionate defender of shareholder rights, addressing the subject repeatedly in his speeches and writings. In 1996, Rodgers took a Catholic nun to task for suggesting that the Cypress Board of Directors lacked ethnic and gender diversity. In a far-ranging letter to the nun, which later became the focus of a page one story in The Wall Street Journal, Rodgers argued that attempts to make corporations more socially responsible prevent them from maximizing profits-and therefore from rewarding shareholders. He returned to the theme in a 1997 opinion piece for The New York Times, criticizing Colin Powell and the Clinton administration for a proposal to mandate corporate contributions to philanthropic causes. In the article, "Holding Up the Shareholder," Rodgers argued that subordinating shareholder value to social responsibility cheats both shareholders and society at large.
Outside business, Rodgers was the first Silicon Valley CEO to lead Santa Clara County's Second Harvest Food Bank Corporate Challenge event. In 2005, Rodgers chaired the event for a second time, garnering the Food Drive Chair Recognition Award. Cypress won its 17th consecutive victory in 2008 for the most pounds of food donated per employee.
In 2007, Rodgers received the Star Award for Extraordinary Support of the Greene Scholars Program. The program is an initiative of the California Alliance of African American Educators and focuses on advancing educational opportunities for African American students pursuing careers related to math, science or technology. The alliance also recognized Rodgers as a Special Corporate Honoree for 2007.
Rodgers received awards from the Healing Institute for his support of the [George Washington] Carver Scholars Program in 2000, 2001 and 2002. Between 1998-2001, he was honored with annual appreciation awards from the Westside Kickers Track Club, a team of inner-city athletes from Oakland, Calif., whose training and travel to regional and national competitions was underwritten by Cypress. The Kickers club won the USA Junior Olympic Championship in 2000.
In 1999, Rodgers' support of a team of underprivileged students from San Jose-based Broadway High School helped the group to capture the Silicon Valley Regional Championship in a national competition to build robots. The competition was sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and NASA's Ames Research facility. The Broadway team went on to win the Silicon Valley Regional Champion Award in 2000 and 2001, capturing the Lonestar Regional Champions Award in 2000; a Southern California Regional Champions Award in 2001; and second place in the National Championship in 2001.
In 2000, Rodgers set up computer facilities with Internet access for economically disadvantaged Northern California student groups, donating equipment and money to the East Palo Alto Computer Lab and the Girls Club of the Mid-Peninsula.
In 2004, Cypress inaugurated the Cypress Semiconductor Spinal Cord Rehabilitation Gymnasium at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in California. A year later, the company donated funds to help the medical center establish a mobile prenatal clinic.
Rodgers' public presentations include a 2002 speech criticizing accounting practices mandated by the Federal Accounting Standards Board; it was delivered to the Stanford Directors' College and published by the libertarian Cato Institute under the title "Corporate Accounting: Congress and FASB Ignore Business Realities" (see www.Cato.org). His November 1998 speech, "Why Silicon Valley Should Not Normalize Relations with Washington DC," was the keynote address at an event cosponsored by Cato and the Economist magazine.
Rodgers' speech, "Let Our Options Go!" was delivered in 1994 to a grassroots rally in Silicon Valley supporting broad-based employee-equity programs. At that time, it helped to kill FASB's attempt to force companies to expense stock options on their income statement. His 1990 speech, "The American Semiconductor Industry: Winner or Whiners?" was delivered to a meeting of the American Electronics Association in Seattle, Washington, and took his own industry to task for competitive losses to Japan during the late 1980s. Speaking to the June 1989 graduating class at Dartmouth College, Rodgers' "An Entrepreneur's View of American Competitiveness" extolled the virtues of entrepreneurial initiative.
Rodgers' personal interests include movies; cooking, especially Italian, French, and Chinese cuisine; collecting wines, notably French burgundies; and tending his three Pinot Noir vineyards, with which he intends to produce wines surpassing those in his collection. He is a member of the Board of Visitors and Fellows at the Department of Viticulture and Enology, University of California, Davis. In addition, Rodgers is an avid jogger, logging four to six miles daily.
Executive Vice President, Finance and Administration and Chief Financial Officer
Brad W. Buss was appointed executive vice president of finance and administration and chief financial officer at Cypress in August 2005. Prior to joining Cypress, Mr. Buss served as vice president of finance at Altera Corp. A veteran of the electronics industry, he spent seven years as a finance executive with Wyle Electronics, culminating as chief financial officer and secretary of the Atlas Services Division. Mr. Buss was also a member of Cisco System's worldwide sales finance team. In addition, he served as senior vice president of finance and chief financial officer and secretary at Zaffire Inc.
Mr. Buss graduated from McMaster University with a bachelor's degree in economics. He also received an honors business administration degree, majoring in finance and accounting, from the University of Windsor. He began his finance career as an auditor with Arthur Anderson.
Chris Seams has been an executive vice president at Cypress Semiconductor Corporation since 2000. He is responsible for Sales and Marketing.
Mr. Seams earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1984 from Texas A&M University and his master's degree in electrical and computer engineering in 1988 from the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to joining Cypress in 1990, he worked in process development for Advanced Micro Devices and Philips Research Laboratories. In addition to his current Sales and Marketing responsibilities, his assignments at Cypress have included technical and operational management in manufacturing, development, and operations.
Mr. Seams is a senior member of IEEE, serves on the Engineering Advisory Council for Texas A&M University, and is a board member of Joint Venture Silicon Valley.
Executive Vice President, Consumer and Computation Division
Norm Taffe was named vice president of the Consumer and Computation Division (CCD) at Cypress in August 2005. The division designs and develops solutions for many of the world's leading manufacturers of consumer and computation gear, including PCs, keyboards, mice, video game systems, TVs and DVD recorders, mass storage peripherals, MP3 players and many other consumer electronics devices. CCD product offerings include the industry's broadest selection of USB controllers; Cypress's WirelessUSB™ radio-system-on-a-chip; timing solutions -- including the world's first spread-spectrum crystal oscillator packaged with a high-frequency crystal; and Cypress's flexible PSoC™ Programmable System-On-Chip™ mixed signal array.
Since joining Cypress in 1989, Taffe has held numerous positions of increasing responsibility, including marketing director of the Programmable Logic and Interface Products Divisions, managing director of Cypress's M&A and venture fund, managing director of the Wireless Business Unit and most recently, vice president of the Personal Communications Division.
Executive Vice President, Data Communications Division
Dinesh Ramanathan was appointed vice president of the Data Communication Division in Nov 2005. Prior to his current position, Ramanathan was the business unit director for the Specialty Memories, Communications and CPLD business, whose products include dual ports, MoBL dual ports, HD equalizers and PHYs.
Before joining Cypress in April 2004, Ramanathan held senior management positions at Raza Microelectronics and Raza Foundries. While at Raza Foundries, an incubating venture capital company, he was an observer on the board of Trebia Networks (acquired by Emulex) and SiSilk Networks (acquired by Raza Microelectronics). Ramanathan gained experience in design and VLSI CAD while working at Forte Design Systems and Synopsys Inc.
Ramanathan holds a Ph.D degree in Information and Computer Science from the University of California at Irvine. He also holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and a master's degree in Mathematics from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) at Pilani in India . Ramanathan has published several articles in the areas of timing and power optimization for embedded systems, online algorithms and the design of distributed computer systems.
Executive Vice President, Memory and Imaging Division
Dana Nazarian was named executive vice president of the Memory and Imaging Division at Cypress in February 2009.
Nazarian is a career Cypress employee. He joined Cypress in 1988 as a product engineer and was later promoted to fab process engineering manager, responsible for half of Cypress's Fab2 facility in Round Rock, Texas. In 1994, Nazarian became yield manager for Fab 2—a position he held for three years.
From 1997-2001, Nazarian was director of yield and technology transfer for Cypress until shifting roles to direct product engineering for the Micropower SRAM business unit in 2001. In 2005, he was named senior director of the synchronous SRAM business unit, and was later promoted to vice president in 2008.
Nazarian graduated from Renesselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1988 with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering.
Executive Vice President, New Product Development, Engineering, Information Technology
Paul Keswick has served as a member of Cypress's Executive Team since 1991. He is currently the Executive Vice President of New Product Development, a position he has held since 1996. He presently manages a 600-person team across the US, Europe, China and India. Current responsibilities include managing worldwide Design, Product & Test Engineering, IT, HR and Legal. His key contributions include defining and deploying new product development business processes, managing global design systems, deploying and managing IT systems, and ensuring that Cypress stays on the leading edge of performance on new product delivery. He has held various technical, managerial, and executive positions at AMD and Cypress Semiconductor. He has been with Cypress 20 years and holds 10 U.S. Patents. He holds a BSEE from the University of California, Berkeley and an MBA from Santa Clara University.
Cathal Phelan re-joined Cypress in September 2008 as executive vice president and chief technical officer, having left Cypress at the start of 2006.
In his role as chief technical officer, Phelan is focused on driving Cypress's transition from a silicon provider to a system-level solutions vendor. He is responsible for defining and leading all applications and systems engineering groups, solution centers and lead architect and software teams across the company.
From early 2006 until his recent return to Cypress, Phelan was the CEO and president at Ubicom Inc., a venture capital backed startup in Mountain View, Calif., focused on a unique, high-performance 32-bit RISC, 12-way multi-threaded communications and media processor for transporting digital media over home networks.
During his first term at Cypress, Phelan held a number of engineering and management roles at the company ending with his position as the EVP of the Data Communications Division from January 2005. Prior to that he headed up the Personal Communications Division (now the Consumer and Computation Division) which under his five-year leadership, was able to grow to better than a 40 percent market share in the standalone USB market.
Phelan originally joined Cypress in January 1991, and spent those early years in a number of positions including director of New Products and Design, the Synchronous Business Unit manager, and RAM3 design project leader in the Memory Products Division, now MID. Prior to Cypress, Phelan worked for six years at the Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven, Netherlands. He worked in the Advanced Memory Design Center on innovative memory architecture and design. Phelan currently holds 37 U.S. patents (27 at Cypress).
Phelan graduated from the engineering school of Trinity College at the University of Dublin in Ireland. He received a BAI (1st class) (bachelor's degree in electrical engineering equivalent in the U.S.), a bachelor's degree in mathematics (1984), and master's degree in electrical engineering (1985).
Shahin Sharifzadeh serves as executive vice president of worldwide wafer fabrication and technology and as president of Cypress's China operations. He is based in Shanghai, China. Sharifzadeh directs Cypress's process technology R&D and wafer manufacturing operations worldwide. Prior to his current position, Sharifzadeh served as Cypress's vice president of R&D, where he was responsible for all aspects of technology development.
Sharifzadeh received his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California in 1984, his MSEE and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1986 and 1989 respectively. He joined Cypress in 1989 and is a senior member of IEEE and a member of the Technology Program Committee for the VSLI Symposium.
Thomas Surrette
Executive Vice President, Human Resources
Tom Surrette was named Executive Vice President of Human Resources at Cypress in September 2008.
After working at Philips/Signetics in software, test and product engineering roles, Surrette joined Cypress as a senior test engineer in July 1990. He completed a series of engineering, manufacturing and technical management assignments and then worked in marketing and product development roles. Surrette was named the Business Unit Director for Micropower SRAM in 1998, for Synchronous SRAM in 2003, and then Vice President for Non-Volatile Memory in 2005. While in these roles he completed the acquisition of Micron Technologies' SRAM inventory, executed a series of licensing, development and manufacturing agreements with partner companies, and served on the board of directors for Simtek Corporation. In 2007, Surrette was named Sr. Vice President of Worldwide Operations for Cypress.
Surrette earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1984 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and an M.B.A. from Santa Clara University in 1990.
Harry Sim
Chief Executive Officer, Cypress Envirosystems
Harry Sim was appointed CEO of the Cypress Envirosystems in September, 2006. Cypress Envirosystems is a new subsidiary which leverages the technologies within Cypress to build systems and solutions for sale to end-customers.
Sim joins Cypress from Honeywell, where he was most recently the Global Vice-President of Marketing for their $2B Industrial Process Control business. During his 15 years with Honeywell, he has held executive positions in General Management, Strategy, Mergers and Acquisitions, and Internet Startup founder. He worked in Asia Pacific and in Europe for over ten years in the Industrial, Home and Building Automation, and Sensors divisions. Prior to Honeywell, he worked for NASA Mission Control in Houston, where he was the Payload Director for Shuttle Flight STS-40 in 1991.
Sim holds BS and MS degrees in engineering from Stanford, and an MBA from Insead in France.
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