T. J. Rodgers

At 76 years old, T. J. Rodgers physical status not available right now. We will update T. J. Rodgers's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

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. Instead Rodgers accepted a job at American Microsystems, Inc. (AMI), where he continued working on a special chip technology he invented at Stanford, but this project was a failure.

Rodgers founded Cypress Semiconductor in 1982 and served as founding CEO. Cypress is a semiconductor design and manufacturing company, producing PSoCs, microcontroller, IoT, wireless and USB, PMICs, memory and sensor chips. As CEO, Rodgers was responsible for more than 30 acquisitions, including SunPower and the IoT portfolio of Broadcom Corporation. Cypress also benefited from its business with Apple Inc., as its PSoC was behind the iPod click wheel. He stepped down as CEO in April 2016. 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.

In 2017 Rodgers conducted a successful proxy fight against Cypress. He raised concerns pertaining to director compensation, state-sponsored foreign competition as well as inherent conflicts of interest. After filing a lawsuit against the company in April 2017, Rodgers sought to remove executive chairman Ray Bingham and Éric Benhamou from the Cypress board and nominated Dan McCranie and Camillo Martino as directors. Rodgers argued that Bingham's role as a co-founder of Canyon Bridge, a private equity fund supported by the Government of China, constituted a clear conflict of interest as acquisition targets for both companies overlapped. 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.

Rodgers early recognized the value of high efficiency solar cells produced by SunPower. As SunPower faced financial problems in 2001, Rodgers tried to convince the Cypress board to buy the solar cell producer. Rodgers and SunPower CEO Richard 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. 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. In 2005 SunPower went public and reached a market capitalization of $10.4 billion in 2007. From May 2002 to May 2011, Rodgers served as chairman of SunPower.

In January 2017, Rodgers invested US$5 million in Enphase Energy, a renewable energy firm specialized in energy management and the production of solar micro-inverters, which transform solar energy to alternating current for the electrical grid. In addition to his investment, Rodgers joined Enphase's board of directors.

Rodgers also served as director of the Semiconductor Industry Association.

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