AMD's Lisa Su Receives Robert Noyce Award, Named After First Intel CEO

This week Dr. Lisa Su, chief executive of AMD, received the 2020 Robert N. Noyce Award in recognition of her achievements in the semiconductor industry. The award is considered to be one of the most prestigious in the semiconductor world. 

The Robert Noyce award was created in 1990 by the SIA Board of Directors to honor the memory of Robert Noyce (who passed away earlier that year), who co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957, Intel in 1968, and the Semiconductor Industry Association in 1977.  

Lisa Su is the 30th semiconductor industry executive to receive the Robert Noyce award and she is the second AMD CEO to get the award after Jerry Sanders in 1998. Over the years, four Intel executives, three IBM executives, three Texas Instruments executives, two Applied Materials executives, and two Micron executives have received the award. Officials from other companies received the Robert Noyce award only once.

Dr. Su joined AMD in 2012 and has served as president and CEO of AMD since October 2014. During her tenure as the head of at AMD, Lisa Su has significantly changed the way how the company executes and has managed to launch a number of successful CPU families and microarchitectures that enabled the company to turn around from a struggling designer of processors into a rapidly growing company. The most recent achievement of Dr. Su is the agreement to acquire Xilinx and transform AMD into an industry giant with a portfolio of CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs. 

Prior to AMD, Dr. Su served in a variety of high-level roles at Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, and Texas Instruments. 

“It is a tremendous honor to receive the Noyce Award and join the distinguished list of previous recipients, many of whom I’m fortunate to count as mentors, role models, colleagues, and friends,” said Su. “I look forward to continuing to push the envelope of what we can accomplish in the semiconductor industry, which has become so instrumental to every aspect of our lives.”