Thurman John "T. J." Rodgers (born March 15, 1948)[1] is an American billionaire scientist and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Cypress Semiconductor and holds patents ranging from semiconductors to energy to winemaking. Rodgers is known for his public relations acumen, brash personality, and strong advocacy of laissez-fairecapitalism. He stepped down as Cypress CEO in April 2016 and Director in August 2016 after serving for 34 years.[2]
After finishing a doctorate at Stanford, he turned down a job offer from Intel, saying that CEO Andrew S. Grove was unlikely to give him the freedom to pursue his own projects.[4] Instead Rodgers accepted a job at American Microsystems, Inc. (AMI), where he continued development of VMOS, but this project was a failure.
Cypress Semiconductor
Rodgers founded Cypress Semiconductor in 1982 and served as founding CEO.[6] Cypress is a semiconductor design and manufacturing company, producing PSoCs, microcontroller, IoT, wireless and USB, PMICs, memory and sensor chips.[7] As CEO, Rodgers was responsible for more than 30 acquisitions,[8] including SunPower and the IoT portfolio of Broadcom Corporation.[6] Cypress also benefited from its business with Apple Inc., as its PSoC was behind the iPod click wheel.[9] He stepped down as CEO in April 2016.[6] In 2015, Cypress had more than 6,000 employees and revenues of US$1.6 billion. The company had about 7,000 issued patents and about 1,200 additional patent applications on record.[10]
Proxy fight
In 2017 Rodgers conducted a successful proxy fight against Cypress. He raised concerns pertaining to director compensation,[11] state-sponsored foreign competition[12] as well as inherent conflicts of interest.[13] After filing a lawsuit against the company in April 2017, Rodgers sought to remove executive chairman Ray Bingham[14][15] and Éric Benhamou from the Cypress board and nominated Dan McCranie and Camillo Martino as directors.[16] Rodgers argued that Bingham's role as a co-founder of Canyon Bridge,[17] a private equity fund supported by the Government of China,[13] constituted a clear conflict of interest as acquisition targets for both companies overlapped.[17] Bingham was forced to resign from the Cypress board in early June 2017 and both of Rodgers' nominees won the subsequent 2017 shareholder election against Benhamou.[16]
SunPower
Rodgers early recognized the value[18] of high efficiency solar cells produced by SunPower. As SunPower faced financial problems in 2001, Rodgers[19] tried to convince the Cypress board[18] to buy the solar cell producer.[20] Rodgers and SunPower CEORichard Swanson had met in the 70s at Stanford University. But as the Cypress board of directors was not interested in saving the struggling company Rodgers wrote a check himself for $750,000.[19] About a year later Rodgers had convinced the board to invest $9 million in SunPower and a few months later Cypress bought a majority stake in SunPower.[18] In 2005 SunPower went public[20] and reached a market capitalization of $10.4 billion in 2007.[18] From May 2002 to May 2011, Rodgers served as chairman of SunPower.[21]
After successfully launching a petition drive to get his name on the ballot, Rodgers won the alumni trustee election of Dartmouth College in 2004,[26] becoming the first successful petition candidate since 1980.[27] He won with a comfortable margin.[28] As trustee, Rodgers’ major concerns were removing the College's speech code,[27] increasing the budget for teacher salaries and strengthening Dartmouth's focus on undergraduate education.[29] Following the campaign of Rodgers, three additional independent trustees were elected in 2005 and 2007.[30] Rodgers was reelected as trustee in 2009.[27]
Clos de la Tech
Rodgers began winemaking in 1996 on a one-acre vineyard surrounding his house in Woodside. Later he bought two additional vineyards and, along with his wife Valeta, Rodgers established the winery Clos de la Tech in the Santa Cruz Mountains of Silicon Valley. Clos de la Tech uses old French winemaking techniques of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti[31] to make five Pinot Noir wines. This includes stomping the grapes with feet and siphoning the wine by hand.[32] Also, no mechanized pumps are used.[33] Clos de la Tech combines these old techniques with high tech monitoring[34] and measures to optimize the conditions for the crops and to handle grapes and wine as gently as possible.[32] Clos de la Tech's Pinot Noirs have been rated up to 96 points by Wine Enthusiast Magazine.[35] As winemaker, Rodgers invented a patented wine press and computer monitored fermenters.[31] He also designed and built the first wireless wine fermentation network, comprising 152 fermenters, and donated the system worth US$3.5 million to the UC Davis winery.[36]
Comments on diversity
In 1996, Rodgers received a form letter from Sister Doris Gormley, the Director of Corporate Social Responsibility for The Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia, encouraging him to hire women and minorities on the Cypress board. He replied with a long letter defending his hiring practices and philosophy. This exchange between Rodgers and Gormley drew considerable media attention.[37][38] In 1999,[39] he wrote an editorial in the San Jose Mercury News denouncing Jesse Jackson's attack[40] on Cypress Semiconductor on what Jackson claimed was discriminatory hiring practices.[41]
2004 US6835616 – Method of forming a floating metal structure in an integratedcircuit[57] US6730545 – Method of performing back-end manufacturing of an integrated circuit device[58] US2004076712 – Fermentation tank wine press [59]
2005 US6903002 – Low-k dielectric layer with air gaps[60] US6847218 – Probe card with an adapter layer for testing integrated circuits[61]
2006 US7045387 – Method of performing back-end manufacturing of an integrated circuit[62]
2007 US7227804 – Current source architecture for memory device standby current reduction[63]
^Rodgers, T. J. (May 23, 1996). "Profits vs. PC – A Silicon Valley CEO says no to boardroom quotas — on moral grounds". Reason. … Thank you for your letter criticizing the lack of racial and gender diversity of Cypress's Board of Directors. I received the same letter from you last year. I will reiterate the management arguments opposing your position. Then I will provide the philosophical basis behind our rejection of the operating principles espoused in your letter, which we believe to be not only unsound, but even immoral, by a definition of that term I will present.
^Evangelista, Benny (March 3, 1999). "Workforce Coalition Lashes Out at Rodgers: Cypress CEO had criticized Jesse Jackson's visit". SFGATE. Hearst Communications. Retrieved July 28, 2024. It's insulting that Jesse Jackson flies into the Silicon Valley, which I revere as one of the best places on earth and one of the most unprejudiced places on earth, and tells us we're prejudiced, he is ignorant about the situation here in the Silicon Valley.
