Thurman Rodgers Biography and Net Worth

Thurman J. (“T.J.”) Rodgers has served as a member of our board of directors since 2012. Rodgers founded Cypress Semiconductor in 1982. He served as Cypress’ CEO for 34 years until stepping down as the longest-tenured CEO among all publicly traded technology companies.

Rodgers is a former chairman of the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) and SunPower Corp. In addition to Enovix, he currently serves on the boards of other energy-related companies: Enphase Energy Inc. (energy and storage technologies), Solaria Corp. (advanced solar energy products) and FTC Solar (single-axis tracking for solar).

Rodgers is a trustee emeritus of Dartmouth College, his alma mater. From 2004 to 2012, he served as a member of Dartmouth’s board of trustees. Rodgers was Sloan scholar at Dartmouth, where he graduated in 1970 as Salutatorian with a double major in physics and chemistry. He won the Townsend Prize and the Haseltine Chemistry-Physics 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, he 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 founding Cypress in 1982.