Lisa Su

Lisa Su (born 7 November 1969) is an American business executive and electrical engineer who is the president, chief executive officer and chair of AMD.

Early in her career, Su worked at Texas Instruments, IBM, and Freescale Semiconductor in engineering and management positions.

She is known for her work developing silicon-on-insulator semiconductor manufacturing technologies and more efficient semiconductor chips during her time as vice president of IBM's Semiconductor Research and Development Center.

Lisa Tzwu-Fang Su was born in November of 1969 in Tainan, Taiwan.

She was born in a Taiwanese Hokkien speaking family.

She immigrated to the United States at the age of 3 with her parents Su Chun-hwai (蘇春槐) and Sandy Lo (羅淑雅).

Both she and her brother were encouraged to study math and science as children.

When she was seven, her father – a retired statistician – began quizzing her on multiplication tables.

Her mother, an accountant who later became an entrepreneur, introduced her to business concepts.

At a young age, Su aspired to be an engineer, explaining "I just had a great curiosity about how things worked".

When she was 10, she began taking apart and then fixing her brother's remote control cars, and she owned her first computer in junior high school, an Apple II.

She attended the Bronx High School of Science in New York City, graduating in 1986.

Su began attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the fall of 1986, intending to major in either electrical engineering or computer science.

She settled on electrical engineering, recollecting that it seemed like the most difficult major.

During her freshman year she worked as an undergrad research assistant "manufacturing test silicon wafers for graduate students" through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP).

The project, as well as her summer jobs at Analog Devices, fueled her interest in semiconductors.

She remained focused on the topic for the remainder of her education, spending much of her time in labs designing and adjusting products.

From 1990 to 1994 she studied for her PhD under MIT advisor Dimitri Antoniadis.

MIT Technology Review reports that as a doctoral candidate, Su was "one of the first researchers to look into silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology, a then unproven technique for increasing transistors' efficiency by building them atop layers of an insulating material".

After earning her bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, Su obtained her master's degree from MIT in 1991.

She graduated with her PhD in electrical engineering from MIT in 1994.

Her PhD thesis was titled Extreme-submicrometer silicon-on-insulator (SOI) MOSFETs.

Su has served on the boards of Analog Devices, Cisco Systems, Inc., the Global Semiconductor Alliance, and the U.S. Semiconductor Industry Association.

In June 1994, Su became a member of the technical staff at Texas Instruments, working in the company's Semiconductor Process and Device Center (SPDC) until February 1995.

That month, IBM hired Su as a research staff member specializing in device physics, and she was appointed vice president of IBM's semiconductor research and development center.

During her time at IBM, Su played a "critical role" in developing the "recipe" to make copper connections work with semiconductor chips instead of aluminum, "solving the problem of preventing copper impurities from contaminating the devices during production".

Working with various IBM design teams on the details of the device, Su explained, "my specialty was not in copper, but I migrated to where the problems were".

The copper technology was launched in 1998, resulting in new industry standards and chips that were up to 20% faster than the conventional versions.

In 2000, Su was given a year-long assignment as the technical assistant for Lou Gerstner, IBM's CEO.

She subsequently took on the role of director of emerging projects, stating that "I was basically director of myself – there was no one else in the group".

As head and founder of IBM's Emerging Products division, Su ran a startup company and soon hired 10 employees to focus on biochips and "low-power and broadband semiconductors".

Their first product was a microprocessor that improved battery life in phones and other handheld devices.

MIT Technology Review named her a "Top Innovator Under 35" in 2001, in part due to her work with Emerging Products.

Through her division, Su represented IBM in a collaboration to create next-generation chips with Sony and Toshiba.

Ken Kutaragi charged the collaboration with "improving the performance of game machine processors by a factor of 1,000", and Su's team eventually came up with the idea for a nine-processor chip, which later became the Cell microprocessor used to power devices such as the Sony PlayStation 3.

Su was appointed president and CEO of AMD in October 2014, after joining the company in 2012 and holding roles such as senior vice president of AMD's global business units and chief operating officer.

She currently serves on the boards of Cisco Systems, Global Semiconductor Alliance and the U.S. Semiconductor Industry Association, and is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Recognized with a number of awards and accolades, she was named Executive of the Year by EE Times in 2014 and one of the World's Greatest Leaders in 2017 by Fortune.

She became the first woman to receive the IEEE Robert Noyce Medal in 2021.

As of 2016 she has published over forty technical articles and coauthored a book chapter discussing next-generation consumer electronics.