AMD’s current CEO, Dr. Lisa Su is accredited as being the one who managed to pull the company from bringing bankruptcy. She became the CEO of AMD in 2014, and since then AMD’s stock has soared—from less than the US $2 per share to more than $110. The company is now a leader in high-performance computing.
Meanwhile, Dr. Su received accolades for spearheading AMD’s turnaround, appearing on Barron’s Top CEOs of 2021 list, Fortune‘s 2020 Most Powerful Women, and CNN’s Risk-Takers. Recently, however, she was awarded yet another honor which is the IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal.
The AMD CEO is the first woman to receive the award, which recognizes her “leadership in groundbreaking semiconductor products and successful business strategies that contributed to the strength of the microelectronics industry.” ironically, the award is sponsored by Intel, and is considered to be one of the semiconductor industry’s most prestigious honors.
“To be honest, I would have never imagined that I would receive the Noyce award. It’s an honor of a lifetime. To have that recognition from my peers in the technical community is a humbling experience. But I love what I do and being able to contribute to the semiconductor industry.”
Su has spent most of her career working on semiconductor projects for large companies. And along the way, the AMD CEO soon evolved from a researcher to manager to top executive. Su said that if she has to, she can divide her career path into two parts. For the first 20 or so years, she was involved in research and development; for the past 15 years, she has worked on the business side.
She took her first job with Texas Instruments, in Dallas, and she was working as a member of the technical staff at the company’s semiconductor process and device center. Later she left the company to work for IBM, in New York. At IBM she worked as a staff member researching device physics. In 2000 she was assigned to be the technical assistant for IBM’s chief executive and later got promoted to director of emerging projects.
It was in the year 2006 when she made the switch to management and got appointed as the vice president of IBM’s semiconductor research and development center in New York.
“I remember thinking after every class that I had learned something that I could apply going forward. Su says she doesn’t agree with the notion that leadership is an innate ability. I do believe that you can be trained to be a good leader. A lot of leadership isn’t all that intuitive, but over time you develop an intuition for things to look for. Experience helps. As engineers transition into business or management, you have to think about a different set of challenges that are not necessarily ‘How do you make your transistor go faster?’ but [instead] ‘How do you motivate teams?’ or ‘How do you understand more about what customers want?’ I’ve made my share of mistakes in those transitions, but I’ve also learned a lot. I’ve also learned something from every boss I’ve ever worked for.”
One of the first places she got a chance to put her training into action was at Freescale Semiconductor, in Austin, Texas. In 2007 she took over as chief technology officer and oversaw the company’s research and development efforts.
And finally, in the year 2012, she entered AMD as the company’s senior vice president, overseeing the company’s global business units. And finally, after two years, she became the company’s president and CEO, and also the first woman to run a Fortune 500 semiconductor company.
“It’s a little bit of you have to be good [at what you do], but you also have to be lucky and be in the right place at the right time. I was fortunate in that I had a lot of opportunities throughout my career. What I try to do is ensure that we’re giving people a lot of opportunities. We have some very strong technical leaders at AMD who are women, so we’re making progress. But of course, it’s nowhere near enough and it’s nowhere near fast enough. There’s always much more that can be done.”
She strongly believes it is an important part of her job to motivate the employees and she is best at it: “One of the things I believe is that great leaders can have their teams do 120 percent more than what they thought was possible. What we try to do is to inspire phenomenal and exceptional results.”
Coming to AMD, currently, the business of the company is booming and it’s building the next generation of supercomputers, which according to Su will be “important in many aspects of research going forward.”
AMD’s CPUs and GPUs will even be powering Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s El Capitan exascale-class supercomputer which is predicted to be the world’s fastest when it goes into service in 2023.
“The way to think about semiconductor technology and road maps is that the decisions about the products that we’re building today were decisions that were made three to five years ago. And the products or technical decisions that we’re making today will affect our products three to five years down the road.”
