Female executives in the semiconductor industry

March 8th of each year is a holiday established to celebrate the important contributions and great achievements made by women in the fields of economy, politics and society. Women are as good as men in all walks of life, and similarly, there are many female characters who have promoted the development of the semiconductor industry through their excellent work and decisions.

AMD Lisa Su

In 2014, AMD welcomed the first female CEO in its 49-year history, Lisa Su. Before joining AMD, Su worked in technical positions at IBM, Freescale and Texas Instruments. She holds bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After joining AMD in January 2012, Su served as chief operating officer, senior vice president and general manager of global business. In October 2014, she was appointed president and CEO of AMD.

At that time, AMD had been losing money for years, and it replaced four CEOs from 2008 to 2011. In 2014, after Su Zifeng officially took over as CEO of AMD, she launched a major reform and put forward the company's three major goals: to create great products, deepen partnerships, and simplify operations. After she took office, AMD launched the blockbuster new Ryzen processor, took the lead in Intel's layout of 7nm chips, and launched Radeon graphics cards to compete for the workstation market, making AMD a rival that can compete with Intel and Nvidia in just four years. In 2017, AMD announced revenue of US$5.33 billion, a year-on-year increase of 25%, and a profit of US$43 million. In 2016, it had a net loss of US$497 million. AMD ended its long-term negative profit and loss state and officially turned losses into profits. It can be said that Su Zifeng is a well-deserved hero of AMD.

IBM Ginni Rometty

Rometty joined IBM in 1981 and has held the three major positions of IBM Chairman, President and CEO since 2012. In October 2011, Rometty was appointed the company's new president and CEO, and the appointment took effect on January 1, 2012. This is also the first woman to hold the top leadership position in IBM's 100-year history.

In 2002, Rometty supported and assisted in the acquisition of consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers for $3.5 billion. This acquisition was called "the largest acquisition in the history of professional services" and the second largest acquisition in IBM's history. Consulting services are the foundation of IBM's IT services business, which also made IBM from a pure technology provider to a top strategic consulting company. After taking office, she announced that IBM would cooperate with SAP for cloud computing and Twitter for data analysis. In 2015, she also launched a partnership with Box. In May 2017, Austin Business reported that Rometty successfully moved IBM from "shrinking businesses such as computer and operating system software to high-growth areas such as artificial intelligence." About half of IBM's 9,043 patents in 2017 came from artificial intelligence, cloud computing, cybersecurity, blockchain and quantum computing. In January 2018, she announced that IBM's revenue in the first quarter increased year-on-year for the first time since 2012, especially in the fields of data, blockchain and cloud computing.

He Tingbo, Huawei HiSilicon

He Tingbo joined Huawei in 1996 and has served as chief engineer of the chip business, director of HiSilicon R&D management department, etc. He is currently the president of HiSilicon and vice president of 2012 Laboratory.

He Tingbo has worked at Huawei for more than 20 years, and has experienced the evolution from 0.5 microns to 0.35, 0.25, and then to 28, 16, 10, and 7 nanometers. It is reported that she first joined Huawei to work in Shenzhen, and the first chip she made was an optical communication chip. In 1998, Huawei began to develop 3G, and the team was in Shanghai, so she went to Shanghai alone, not only to establish the wireless chip department, but also to make 3G wireless network chips. Later, Huawei needed He Tingbo to work in Silicon Valley for a period of time, and she worked in Silicon Valley for two years. In 2004, Ren Zhengfei found He Tingbo and said that he would give her 400 million yuan and 20,000 people every year to let her develop chips, so He Tingbo started the research of Kirin chips. In 2013, HiSilicon achieved profitability under the leadership of He Tingbo, with revenue reaching 9.2 billion yuan and 5,000 employees. At this time, Huawei's mobile phones and chips entered a stage of rapid development.

Ampere Renée James

Renée James, former president of Intel, joined Intel in 1987 and was once the office director of Andy Grove, the former legendary CEO of Intel. She also led Intel's $7.7 billion acquisition of McAfee in 2010. In 2013, James was appointed as Intel's first female president, and she left Intel two years later. In October 2017, Renée James founded Ampere Computing, which focuses on the data center server market.

In September 2018, Ampere officially announced the company's first ARM architecture 64-bit server chip, aiming to challenge Intel's dominance in server chips. The processor is designed to handle a variety of data center workloads, forming a more direct competitive relationship with Intel.

Gree Dong Mingzhu

Dong Mingzhu joined Gree as a business manager in 1990. Since 1994, she has successively served as the director of the business department, deputy general manager, and deputy chairman of Gree Electric Appliances Co., Ltd. of Zhuhai. In May 2012, she was appointed chairman of Gree Group.

After the ZTE incident, Gree's chairman Dong Mingzhu boasted that she would spend 50 billion to develop chips. On August 14, a company called Zhuhai Zero Boundary Integrated Circuit Co., Ltd. was officially established. Its main business scope includes the development and sales of semiconductors, integrated circuits, and chips. Its registered capital is 1 billion yuan, and its legal representative is Gree's chairman Dong Mingzhu. According to The Paper, Zhuhai Zero Boundary is indeed a subsidiary that Gree has just established, and its main business scope revolves around the development and design of chips for air conditioners. In December 2018, Gree Electric issued an announcement revealing that the company will invest 3 billion yuan to indirectly acquire a stake in Ansem Semiconductor, which is also the largest foreign investment by the air-conditioning giant to date. On March 3, 2019, at the residence of the NPC delegation to the two sessions, Dong Mingzhu, a member of the National People's Congress and chairman of Gree Electric, was interviewed by a reporter from the Shanghai Securities News. Regarding the chip business, Dong Mingzhu said that Gree had started to get involved in chips in 2015 and "will definitely work hard to do it." But it is impossible to make a chip overnight, "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

GlobalWafers

In March 1998, Xu Xiulan joined Sino-American Crystal as a business assistant and was soon promoted to deputy general manager. After being recognized by Lu Mingguang, she began to participate in many major merger and acquisition projects of the company. Xu Xiulan is currently the director and general manager of Sino-American Silicon Products Co., Ltd. and the chairman and general manager of GlobalWafers Co., Ltd.

During the 20 years that Xu Xiulan worked for the company, she participated in the merger and acquisition of the US company Globitech in 2008, and then led important international merger and acquisition projects such as GlobalWafers' acquisition of the Japanese company Covalent Silicon Corporation in 2012 and the acquisition of the US SunEdison Semiconductor (SEMI) in 2016. Xu Xiulan used the merger and acquisition strategy to make GlobalWafers grow rapidly, enabling it to split Sino-US Silicon in 2011 and go public in 2015. Its performance has been growing all the way, and its revenue has increased year by year since 480 million yuan in 2011. It has increased 95 times in just six years. In 2018, when the market was generally pessimistic about the wafer market, Xu Xiulan made three important decisions. The first major decision was that when the market questioned the oversupply of silicon wafers, she decided to expand the factory against the trend; the second was not to take the opportunity to raise prices, but to sign a long-term contract with orders signed until 2020; the third was to file a lawsuit against the resigned employees for violating the non-competition clause and jumping to Chinese capital.

Texas Instruments

Hu Yuhua joined TI in 2000 as a technical sales engineer and was later promoted to account manager, responsible for several important TI accounts. In 2013, Hu Yuhua was appointed general manager of sales and marketing applications for TI China, with overall responsibility for strengthening TI's position and business development in the Chinese market. In 2015, she was officially appointed president of TI China.

At the 2017 Forbes China Outstanding Businesswomen Awards Ceremony, Hu Yuhua, President of Texas Instruments China, said during a break in the event: "We expect that we will still have many opportunities in the market in the next few years." In terms of application areas, industry and automobiles are two very important markets for TI, and they are also two sectors that are growing very rapidly. In the first quarter of 2018, Texas Instruments showed that TI's operating income increased by 11% compared with the same period last year, with the main contribution coming from the strong growth of the automotive and industrial markets, especially in China.

Cadence Xu Yun

Sherry Xu is currently the Vice President of Cadence and General Manager of China and Southeast Asia. She is responsible for the company's business operations, sales and customer technical support in China, Singapore and Southeast Asia.

Xu Yun has over 22 years of rich experience in the semiconductor and EDA industries. During her tenure at Cadence, she held several leadership positions in the sales and marketing teams. During her tenure as Director of the Asia Pacific Technical Sales Group, she led the Asia Pacific technical sales team, business management team and marketing team to comprehensively strengthen Cadence's market position and business management in the Asia Pacific region and expand Cadence's business in China.

Analogix Semiconductor

Zhang Qian has more than 20 years of experience in the semiconductor and IT industries. She is currently the Vice President of Analogix and General Manager of Analogix Semiconductor (China) Co., Ltd. Prior to joining Analogix, she served as the Chief Representative of Capella Microsystems, an American IC design company, in China, helping the company establish a complete operating system in the Chinese market, including corporate management, business development, financial management, and product development. She was also a partner and general manager of Beijing Qianqing Consulting Company, successfully helping many Chinese customers introduce IT products from companies such as DEC, IBM, EMC, and Oracle.

During her tenure, Zhang Qian founded Analogix Semiconductor's business in China and was responsible for the company's management operations, business development, financial management, and product research and development. In Zhang Qian's 2019 New Year's message to Semiconductor Industry Observer, she said that China is the world's largest semiconductor market, and it is expected that the big market drivers in the future will be artificial intelligence, users, 5G and AR/VR, the Internet of Things and automobiles, whose systems will require lower power consumption, higher network efficiency, lower latency and higher reliability.

Luo Weiwei, founder of Innoscience

Dr. Weiwei Luo founded Innoscience in the United States. With her keen understanding of the industry and the ability to integrate international technical resources, she returned to China at the end of 2015 to start a business and quickly established a strong international third-generation semiconductor industrialization team. In November 2017, Innoscience built the world's first eight-inch silicon-based gallium nitride mass production line and successfully launched a series of products from 30v to 650v.

DowDuPont Company

Shuji Ding has served as global head of lithography at Dow Electronic Materials (formerly Rohm and Haas EM) since May 2012. She is responsible for Dow's optoelectronics business, supporting the semiconductor industry. Prior to joining Dow Chemical, Shuji Ding worked at the AZ Electronic Materials Center R&D facility in New Jersey from 1996 to 2004.

In the past five or six years, Ding Shuji has led Dow Chemical's global photoresist business unit (photoresist is a key raw material in integrated circuits, displays, photovoltaic manufacturing and other fields) and achieved amazing results. The business growth rate is far higher than the industry's growth rate, and annual profits have increased fivefold.

Wang Laichun, Luxshare Precision

Wang Laichun is currently the chairman and general manager of Luxshare Precision Industry Co., Ltd. According to public information, Wang Laichun was one of the first workers of Foxconn in the mainland and worked in the assembly division of Foxconn under Taiwan Hon Hai Precision for nearly 10 years. In 1997, Wang Laichun left Foxconn to start his own business and invested in the purchase of Hong Kong Luxshare with his brother Wang Laisheng. In 2004, Wang Laichun returned to Shenzhen to establish Luxshare Precision.

Luxshare Precision is the largest connector manufacturer in my country. Its main product "connector" is one of the most important components in smartphones. In 2011, Luxshare Precision entered the Apple industry chain, and in 2012, it entered the field of automotive connectors; in 2014, it entered the field of wearable devices and smart homes. Since 2017, in order to adapt to the irreversible trend of smartphone integration and modularization, it has begun to get involved in the field of audio and radio frequency modules. From 2010 to 2016, the demand in the mobile phone market alone has driven the connector market to grow 48 times.

Lens Technology Co., Ltd. Zhou Qunfei

Zhou Qunfei is the founder of Lens Technology. She has been engaged in glass manufacturing for more than 20 years and has mastered a set of special glass processing and production techniques. She started out by making watch glass and became the "king of mobile phone glass".

Lens Technology already accounted for more than 50% of the global market share in 2014, becoming the world's largest supplier of touch-screen glass panels. On March 18, 2015, Lens Technology was listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange's Growth Enterprise Market and achieved 10 consecutive daily limit increases. At present, the company's business has covered window protection glass, touch screen monomers, touch screen modules, cameras, buttons, ceramics, metal accessories, etc. The products are widely used in mobile phones, tablets, laptops, digital cameras, players, GPS navigators, car touch, smart wearables, smart homes, etc. In order to prepare for the 5G era, Lens Technology invested 10 billion yuan to build a Huanghua production base. It is reported that on June 26, 2018, the construction of the Huanghua production base of Lens Technology started. The project is expected to have a total investment of 10 billion yuan, and it is expected to achieve an annual output value of 12 billion yuan after reaching full production.

Bern Optics Lin Huiying

Lin Huiying and her husband Yang Jianwen co-founded Bern Optical Co., Ltd., which supplies screens for two-thirds of Apple mobile phones in the world, as well as for customers such as Samsung and Sony. She is currently the chairman of Bern Optical Co., Ltd.

The main products of Bern Optics include various crystal glass surfaces and PMMA mobile phone lenses, crystal glass, sapphire glass, display lenses, high-end (electronic) glass, flat panel displays, high-end watch glass surfaces, OGS touch screens, metal mobile phone panels, etc. Currently, Lin Huiying and her husband Yang Jianwen jointly own Bern Optics, which has 120,000 employees in mainland China.

Of course, in addition to these, there are many women in the semiconductor industry who play extremely important roles. Whether in terms of personal achievements or their contributions to the company, they use their female wisdom to bring gentle and firm strength to the industry. Today, let us say thank you to the women who have worked and are working in the semiconductor industry.

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