Top Ten Semiconductor CEOs in 2014!

Since my blog about the Intel CEOs went over so well (sarcasm) I thought I should write more about semiconductor chief executive officers. This list comes from David Manners of Electronics Weekly who, unlike me, is a real journalist. Using David’s list as a starting point I will add more candidates at the end and please add yours in the comment section. If you agree or disagree with names on the list feel free to share your opinions, observations, and experiences. Let’s crowd source a top ten list and take a closer look to see what really makes a great semiconductor CEO. One thought I had was to put together a list of questions for the top ten CEOs. If you folks help put together a list I will get the answers, absolutely.

For readability purposes I have provided a link to their full biographies since they are very distinguished men with long lists of accomplishments. I did however include their education since I personally feel it is a qualified data point for a semiconductor CEO.

Syed Ali, President & CEO, Cavium Networks
MSE, University of Michigan

Dr. Jalal Bagherli, Chief Executive Officer, Dialog Semiconductor
Ph.D., Electronics, Kent University, UK

Dr. Oh-Hyun Kwon, Chief Executive Officer of Samsung Electronics Co.
Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, Stanford University

Scott McGregor, President and Chief Executive Officer, Broadcom
MS, Computer Science and Computer Engineering, Stanford University

Ming-Kai Tsai, Chairman & CEO, MediaTek
MSEE, University of Cincinnati

Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder, president, chief executive officer, NVIDIA
MSEE, Stanford University

Dr. Sehat Sutardja, Chairman and CEO and Co-Founder, Marvell Technology Group
Ph.D., EE and CS, University of California at Berkeley

Behrooz Abdi, President and CEO, InvenSense
MSEE, Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Leo Li, Chairman, CEO and President, Spreadtrum Communications
Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland

Steve Mollenkopf, Chief Executive Officer, Qualcomm
MSEE, University of Michigan

To this list I would add:

Moshe Gavrielov, President & Chief Executive Officer, Xilinx
MSCS, Israel Institute of Technology

Fermi Wang, CEO, Ambarella
Ph.D, Electrical Engineering, Columbia University

Dr. Reinhard Ploss, Chief Executive Officer, Infineon Technologies
Ph.D., Chemical Engineering, Technische Universität München

Sanjay Mehrotra, Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer, Sandisk
MSEE and CS, University of California, Berkeley

Dr. Sanjay K. Jha, CEO of GLOBALFOUNDRIES
Ph.D. in Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Strathclyde University, Scotland

Mark Durcan, Chief Executive Officer, Micron
Master of Chemical Engineering, Rice University

Honorable mention: I did not include Dr. Morris Chang since he is not CEO or Dr. Mark Lui and Dr. C.C. Wei since they are TSMC Co-CEOs. I would have also liked to Include Dr. Aart de Geus and Dr. Walden Rhines but they are EDA CEOs. And Sir Hossein Yassaie CEO of Imagination Technologies but that is semiconductor IP.