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The CEO is the first woman to receive IEEE's highest semiconductor award
When Lisa Su became CEO of Advanced Micro Devices in 2014, the company was on the brink of bankruptcy. Since then, AMD's stock has soared—from less than US $2 per share to more than $110. The company is now a leader in high-performance computing.
Su received accolades for spearheading AMD's turnaround, appearing on the Barron's Top CEOs of 2021 list, Fortune's 2020 Most Powerful Women, and CNN's Risk Takers.
She recently added another honor: the IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal. Su 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." Sponsored by Intel, the Noyce Medal 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," the IEEE Fellow says. "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 long had a practical bent. She decided to study electrical engineering, she says, because she was drawn to the prospect of building hardware.
"I felt like I was actually building and making things," she says. She attended MIT, where she earned bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees, all in EE, in 1990, 1991, and 1994.
"It might surprise people that my parents would have preferred that I became a medical doctor," she says, laughing. "That was the most well-respected profession when I was growing up. But I never really liked the sight of blood. I ended up getting a Ph.D., which I guess was the next best thing."
Her interest in semiconductors was sparked at MIT. As a doctoral candidate, Su was one of the first researchers to look into silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology, according to an MIT Technology Review article about her. The then-unproven technique increased transistors' efficiency by building them atop layers of an insulating material. Today SOI is used either to boost the performance of microchips or to reduce their power requirements.
Su has spent most of her career working on semiconductor projects for large companies. Along the way, she evolved from researcher to manager to top executive. Looking back, Su divides her career path into two parts. 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.
Her first job was with Texas Instruments, in Dallas, where she was a member of the technical staff at the company's semiconductor process and device center. She joined in 1994, but after a year, she left for IBM, in New York. There, she was a staff member researching device physics. In 2000 she was assigned to be the technical assistant for IBM's chief executive. She later was promoted to director of emerging projects.
She made the switch to management in 2006, when she was appointed vice president of IBM's semiconductor research and development center in New York.
To better learn how to manage people, she took several leadership courses offered by the company.
"I remember thinking after every class that I had learned something that I could apply going forward," she says.
Su says she doesn't agree with the notion that leadership is an innate ability.
"I really do believe that you can be trained to be a good leader," she says. "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."
"Great leaders can actually have their teams do 120 percent more than what they thought was possible."
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. She was promoted to senior vice president and general manager of Freescale's networking and multimedia group. In that role, she was responsible for global strategy, marketing, and engineering for the embedded communications and applications processor business.
She left in 2012 to join AMD, also in Austin, as senior vice president, overseeing the company's global business units. Two years later she was appointed president and CEO, the first woman to run a Fortune 500 semiconductor company.
It took more than leadership skills to get to the top, she says.
"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," she says. "I was fortunate in that I had a lot of opportunities throughout my career."
As CEO, she fosters a supportive and diverse culture at AMD.
"What I try to do is ensure that we're giving people a lot of opportunities," she says. "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."
Motivating employees is part of her job, she says.
"One of the things I believe is that great leaders can actually have their teams do 120 percent more than what they thought was possible," she says. "What we try to do is to really inspire phenomenal and exceptional results."
AMD's business is booming, and Su is credited with expanding the market for the company's chips beyond PCs to game consoles and embedded devices. AMD released products in 2017 with its Ryzen desktop processors and Epyc server processors for data centers. They are based on its Zen microarchitecture, which enabled the chips to quickly process more instructions than the competition. The Radeon line of graphics cards for gaming consoles debuted in 2000.
The company's net income for last year was nearly $2.5 billion, according to Investor's Business Daily.
Today AMD is focused on building the next generation of supercomputers—which Su says will be "important in many aspects of research going forward."
Last year the company announced its advanced CPUs, GPUs, and software will be powering Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's El Capitan exascale-class supercomputer. Predicted to be the world's fastest when it goes into service in 2023, El Capitan is expected to expand the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
There currently is a tightness in the semiconductor supply chain, Su acknowledges, but she says she doesn't think the shortage will fundamentally change what the company does in terms of technology or product development.
"The way to think about semiconductor technology and road maps," she says, "is that the decisions about the products that we're building today were really 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."
The semiconductor industry has never been more interesting, she says, even with Moore's Law slowing down. Moore's Law, she says, "requires all of us to think differently about how we get to that next level of innovation. And it's not just about silicon innovation. It's also about packaging innovation, system software, and bringing together all those disciplines. There's a whole aspect to our work about just how to make our tools and our technologies easier to adopt."
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought technology into the center of how people work, live, learn, and play, she notes.
"Our goal," she says, "is to continue to make technology that touches more people's lives."
Su was recently appointed to serve on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a group of external advisers tasked with making science, technology, and innovation policy recommendations to the White House and President Biden.
Su joined IEEE while a student so she could access its technical content.
"IEEE publications were just the most important," she says. "As a student, you wanted to publish in an IEEE journal or present at an IEEE conference. We all believed it was where people wanted to share their research.
"I think IEEE is still the foremost organization for bringing researchers together to share their findings, to network, and to develop and build relationships," she says. "I've met many people through my IEEE connections, and they continue to be close colleagues. It's just a great organization to move the industry forward."
Su donated the cash prize of $20,000 she received as part of the Noyce medal to the IEEE Women in Engineering Fund managed through the IEEE Foundation.
This article was updated from an earlier version.
Kathy Pretz is editor in chief for The Institute, which covers all aspects of IEEE, its members, and the technology they're involved in. She has a bachelor's degree in applied communication from Rider University, in Lawrenceville, N.J., and holds a master's degree in corporate and public communication from Monmouth University, in West Long Branch, N.J.
Please correct this typo: "Looking back, Lu...." I am a huge fan of Dr. Su, and I want you to spell her name correctly every single time!
The Nest founder tells of years in pursuit of a thermostat he actually likes
Tony Fadell shows off the Nest thermostat in 2012.
The thermostat chased me for 10 years.
That is pretty extreme, by the way. If you’ve got an idea for a business or a new product, you usually don’t have to wait a decade to make sure it’s worth doing.
For most of the 10 years that I idly thought about thermostats, I had no intention of building one. It was the early 2000s, and I was at Apple making the first iPhone. I got married, had kids. I was busy.
But then again, I was also really cold. Bone-chillingly cold.
Every time my wife and I drove up to our Lake Tahoe ski cabin on Friday nights after work, we’d have to keep our snow jackets on until the next day. The house took all night to heat up.
Adapted from the book BUILD: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell. Copyright 2022 by Tony Fadell. Reprinted by permission of Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Walking into that frigid house drove me nuts. It was mind-boggling that there wasn’t a way to warm it up before we got there. I spent dozens of hours and thousands of dollars trying to hack security and computer equipment tied to an analog phone so I could fire up the thermostat remotely. Half my vacations were spent elbow-deep in wiring, electronics littering the floor. But nothing worked. So the first night of every trip was always the same: We’d huddle on the ice block of a bed, under the freezing sheets, watching our breath turn into fog until the house finally warmed up by morning.
Then on Monday I’d go back to Apple and work on the first iPhone. Eventually I realized I was making a perfect remote control for a thermostat. If I could just connect the HVAC system to my iPhone, I could control it from anywhere. But the technology that I needed to make it happen—reliable low-cost communications, cheap screens and processors—didn’t exist yet.
How did these ugly, piece-of-crap thermostats cost almost as much as Apple’s most cutting-edge technology?
A year later we decided to build a new, superefficient house in Tahoe. During the day I’d work on the iPhone, then I’d come home and pore over specs for our house, choosing finishes and materials and solar panels and, eventually, tackling the HVAC system. And once again, the thermostat came to haunt me. All the top-of-the-line thermostats were hideous beige boxes with bizarrely confusing user interfaces. None of them saved energy. None could be controlled remotely. And they cost around US $400. The iPhone, meanwhile, was selling for $499.
How did these ugly, piece-of-crap thermostats cost almost as much as Apple’s most cutting-edge technology?
The architects and engineers on the Tahoe project heard me complaining over and over about how insane it was. I told them, “One day, I’m going to fix this—mark my words!” They all rolled their eyes—there goes Tony complaining again!
At first they were just idle words born of frustration. But then things started to change. The success of the iPhone drove down costs for the sophisticated components I couldn’t get my hands on earlier. Suddenly high-quality connectors and screens and processors were being manufactured by the millions, cheaply, and could be repurposed for other technology.
My life was changing, too. I quit Apple and began traveling the world with my family. A startup was not the plan. The plan was a break. A long one.
We traveled all over the globe and worked hard not to think about work. But no matter where we went, we could not escape one thing: the goddamn thermostat. The infuriating, inaccurate, energy-hogging, thoughtlessly stupid, impossible-to-program, always-too-hot-or-too-cold-in-some-part-of-the-house thermostat.
Someone needed to fix it. And eventually I realized that someone was going to be me.
This 2010 prototype of the Nest thermostat wasn’t pretty. But making the thermometer beautiful would be the easy part. The circuit board diagrams point to the next step—making it round.Tom Crabtree
The big companies weren’t going to do it. Honeywell and the other white-box competitors hadn’t truly innovated in 30 years. It was a dead, unloved market with less than $1 billion in total annual sales in the United States.
The only thing missing was the will to take the plunge. I wasn’t ready to carry another startup on my back. Not then. Not alone.
Then, magically, Matt Rogers, who’d been one of the first interns on the iPod project, reached out to me. He was a real partner who could share the load. So I let the idea catch me. I came back to Silicon Valley and got to work. I researched the technology, then the opportunity, the business, the competition, the people, the financing, the history.
Making it beautiful wasn’t going to be hard. Gorgeous hardware, an intuitive interface—that we could do. We’d honed those skills at Apple. But to make this product successful—and meaningful—we needed to solve two big problems:
It needed to save energy.
And we needed to sell it.
In North America and Europe, thermostats control half a home’s energy bill—something like $2,500 a year. Every previous attempt to reduce that number—by thermostat manufacturers, by energy companies, by government bodies—had failed miserably for a host of different reasons. We had to do it for real, while keeping it dead simple for customers.
Then we needed to sell it. Almost all thermostats at that point were sold and installed by professional HVAC technicians. We were never going to break into that old boys’ club. We had to find a way into people’s minds first, then their homes. And we had to make our thermostat so easy to install that literally anyone could do it themselves.
It took around 9 to 12 months of making prototypes and interactive models, building bits of software, talking to users and experts, and testing it with friends before Matt and I decided to pitch investors.
Once we had prototypes of the thermostat, we sent it out to real people to test.
It was fatter than we wanted. The screen wasn’t quite what I imagined. Kind of like the first iPod, actually. But it worked. It connected to your phone. It learned what temperatures you liked. It turned itself down when nobody was home. It saved energy. We knew self-installation was potentially a huge stumbling block, so everyone waited with bated breath to see how it went. Did people shock themselves? Start a fire? Abandon the project halfway through because it was too complicated? Soon our testers reported in: Installation went fine. People loved it. But it took about an hour to install. Crap. An hour was way too long. This needed to be an easy DIY project, a quick upgrade.
So we dug into the reports—what was taking so long? What were we missing?
Our testers...spent the first 30 minutes looking for tools.
Turns out we weren’t missing anything—but our testers were. They spent the first 30 minutes looking for tools—the wire stripper, the flathead screwdriver; no, wait, we need a Phillips. Where did I put that?
Once they gathered everything they needed, the rest of the installation flew by. Twenty, 30 minutes tops.
I suspect most companies would have sighed with relief. The actual installation took 20 minutes, so that’s what they’d tell customers. Great. Problem solved.
But this was going to be the first moment people interacted with our device. Their first experience of Nest. They were buying a $249 thermostat—they were expecting a different kind of experience. And we needed to exceed their expectations. Every minute from opening the box to reading the instructions to getting it on their wall to turning on the heat for the first time had to be incredibly smooth. A buttery, warm, joyful experience.
And we knew Beth. Beth was one of two potential customers we defined. The other customer was into technology, loved his iPhone, was always looking for cool new gadgets. Beth was the decider—she dictated what made it into the house and what got returned. She loved beautiful things, too, but was skeptical of supernew, untested technology. Searching for a screwdriver in the kitchen drawer and then the toolbox in the garage would not make her feel warm and buttery. She would be rolling her eyes. She would be frustrated and annoyed.
Shipping the Nest thermostat with a screwdriver "turned a moment of frustration into a moment of delight"Dwight Eschliman
So we changed the prototype. Not the thermostat prototype—the installation prototype. We added one new element: a little screwdriver. It had four different head options, and it fit in the palm of your hand. It was sleek and cute. Most importantly, it was unbelievably handy.
So now, instead of rummaging through toolboxes and cupboards, trying to find the right tool to pry their old thermostat off the wall, customers simply reached into the Nest box and took out exactly what they needed. It turned a moment of frustration into a moment of delight.
Sony laughed at the iPod. Nokia laughed at the iPhone. Honeywell laughed at the Nest Learning Thermostat.
In the stages of grief, this is what we call Denial.
But soon, as your disruptive product, process, or business model begins to gain steam with customers, your competitors will start to get worried. And when they realize you might steal their market share, they’ll get pissed. Really pissed. When people hit the Anger stage of grief, they lash out, they undercut your pricing, try to embarrass you with advertising, use negative press to undermine you, put in new agreements with sales channels to lock you out of the market.
And they might sue you.
The good news is that a lawsuit means you’ve officially arrived. We had a party the day Honeywell sued Nest. We were thrilled. That ridiculous lawsuit meant we were a real threat and they knew it. So we brought out the champagne. That’s right, f---ers. We’re coming for your lunch.
With every generation, the product became sleeker, slimmer, and less expensive to build. In 2014, Google bought Nest for $3.2 billion. In 2016 Google decided to sell Nest, so I left the company. Months after I left, Google changed its mind. Today, Google Nest is alive and well, and they’re still making new products, creating new experiences, delivering on their version of our vision. I deeply, genuinely, wish them well.