T.J. Rodgers is founder, president, CEO, and a director of Cypress Semiconductor Corporation since 1982. He is a former chairman of the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) and SunPower Corp. (solar energy systems) and currently sits on the board of directors of high-technology companies, including Agiga Tech (nvRAMs), Bloom Energy (fuel cells), and Cypress Envirosystems (energy-saving systems). He is a Trustee Emeritus of Dartmouth College, his alma mater.
Rodgers was a Sloan scholar at Dartmouth, where he graduated in 1970 as Salutatorian with a double major in physics and chemistry and won the Townsend Prize as the top physics and chemistry student in his class. 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.