Biography | Lisa Su — IBM's Semiconductor Research and Development Center

People treat the AMD appointment of 2014 as her first collision with a chip company in trouble. She had already run research inside a larger one. After a year on the technical staff at Texas Instruments, IBM hired her in 1995 as a research staff member in device physics. Over thirteen years she worked copper interconnects in place of aluminium, silicon-on-insulator, PowerPC and the Cell processor, and rose to vice president of the Semiconductor Research and Development Center. For a stretch she sat as technical assistant to Louis V. Gerstner Jr. The SRDC work was split across East Fishkill and the Thomas J. Watson Research Center at Yorktown Heights. The pin is Watson, at 1101 Kitchawan Road, because that is the research address a visitor can still stand in front of. In 2007 she left for Freescale in Austin as chief technology officer. The IBM years are the ones that taught the process recipe she later took into a company that was running out of time.