Lisa Tzwu-Fang Su is a Taiwanese-American business executive and electrical engineer who is the president, chief executive officer and chair of AMD.
Lisa Tzwu-Fang Su was born in November 1969 in Tainan, Taiwan. She immigrated to the United States at the age of 3 with her parents, Su and Sandy Lo.
Su is the first woman ever to top The Associated Press’ annual survey of CEO compensation: Her 2019 pay package was valued at $58.5 million.
In February 2022, Su became Chair of AMD after completing a reported $49 billion acquisition of FPGA and programmable systems on chip maker Xilinx.
Early in her career, Su held engineering and management positions at Texas Instruments, IBM, and Freescale Semiconductor.
Recognized with a number of awards and accolades, she was named Executive of the Year by EE Times in 2014 and one of the World’s Greatest Leaders in 2017 by Fortune. She became the first woman to receive the IEEE Robert Noyce Medal in 2021.
Early life and education
When she was 10, she began taking apart and then fixing her brother’s remote-controlled cars. She owned her first computer, an Apple II, in junior high school.
After earning her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, Su obtained her master’s degree from MIT in 1991. From 1990 to 1994 she studied for her PhD under MIT advisor Dimitri Antoniadis.
She graduated with her PhD in electrical engineering from MIT in 1994. Her PhD thesis was titled Extreme-submicrometer silicon-on-insulator (SOI) MOSFETs.
Career
Su has been on the boards of Analog Devices, Cisco Systems, Inc., the Global Semiconductor Alliance, and the U.S. Semiconductor Industry Association. As of 2016 she has published over forty technical articles and coauthored a book chapter discussing next-generation consumer electronics.
1994–1999: Texas Instruments and IBM R&D
In June 1994, Su became a member of the technical staff at Texas Instruments, until February 1995. That month, IBM hired Su as a research staff member specializing in device physics, and she was appointed vice president of IBM’s semiconductor research and development center.
During her time at IBM, Su played a “critical role” in developing the “recipe” to make copper connections work with semiconductor chips instead of aluminum, “solving the problem of preventing copper impurities from contaminating the devices during production”. Working with various IBM design teams on the details of the device, The copper technology was launched in 1998, resulting in new industry standards and chips that were up to 20% faster than the conventional versions.
2000–2007: IBM Emerging Products division
In 2000, Su was given a year-long assignment as the technical assistant for Lou Gerstner, IBM’s CEO.
Through her division, Su represented IBM in a collaboration to create next-generation chips with Sony and Toshiba. Ken Kutaragi charged the collaboration with “improving the performance of game machine processors by a factor of 1,000”, and Su’s team eventually came up with the idea for a nine-processor chip, which later became the Cell microprocessor used to power devices such as the Sony PlayStation 3. She continued as vice president of the semiconductor research and development center at IBM, holding the role until May 2007.
2007–2011: Freescale Semiconductor
Su joined Freescale Semiconductor in June 2007 as chief technology officer (CTO), heading the company’s research and development until August 2009. As head of the company’s networking-chip business, EE Times credited her with helping Freescale get “its house in order”, with the company filing for an IPO in 2011.
2012–2014: AMD appointments
Su became senior vice president and general manager at AMD in January 2012, overseeing the company’s global business units and the “end-to-end business execution” of AMD’s products. Over the next two years she “played a prominent role” in pushing the company to diversify beyond the PC market, including working with Microsoft and Sony to place AMD chips in Xbox One and PS4 game consoles.
On 8 October 2014, AMD announced Su’s appointment to president and CEO, A number of analysts praised the appointment due to Su’s credentials, noting AMD was seeking growth in product areas where Su had “extensive experience”.
2015–2016: AMD diversification
When Su joined AMD in 2012, about 10 percent of sales came from non-PC products. By February 2015, roughly 40 percent of AMD’s sales came from non-PC markets, such as video game consoles and embedded devices. In May 2015, Su and other AMD executives presented a long-term strategy for the company to focus on developing high-performance computing and graphics technologies for three growth areas: gaming, datacenter, and “immersive platforms” markets.
AMD’s share value spiked in July 2016, when AMD reported strong revenue growth. Fortune attributed the “impressive” statistic to Su, stating she “continues to execute on her comeback plan … key gains in graphics and video gaming console chips have boosted results as well as a savvy deal to license server chip designs in China“.
2017–present: Ryzen
After the initial launch of Zen chips in quarter two 2017, AMD‘s percentage of the CPUmarket share surged to nearly 11%.
Ryzen CPUs have received favorable reviews from a variety of news outlets, specifically highlighting their high thread counts at prices drastically lower than those of Intel’s, especially in the high-performance computing market with AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper line of workstation processors.
