Poached exec
As we anticipated yesterday, a mere couple of months after completing its split from AMD, semiconductor manufacturer for hire GlobalFoundries (GF) has confirmed its most aggressive move yet.
The success or failure of GF relies on it acquiring new customers, over and above legacy customer AMD, in a market currently dominated by TSMC. This will not be an easy task, as taking on a foundry is a massive business commitment and TSMC already has well-established relationships with most of the leading semiconductor companies, including AMD on the graphics side.
So what better way to create relationships of its own with these companies than to poach one of the guys who was in charge of that side of things at TSMC? That's exactly what GF has done with the appointment of Subramani Kengeri as VP of design solutions.
Kengeri was senior director, design and technology platform at TSMC and head of its North American design centre in San Jose. In those capacities he will have been a key liaison between TSMC and its customers. He will now be part of the design enablement team, reporting into recent appointment of Mojy Chian, who controlled the relationship with TSMC in his former role at programmable logic solution maker Altera.
At TSMC, Kengeri was primarily charged with developing design solutions for system-on-a-chip (SoC) enablement. This was precisely the technology type that convinced Intel to initiate a collaboration with TSMC around the time GF was formed and Kengeri will have been instrumental in making that deal happen.
While we're sure that Kengeri brings many unique qualities to GF, we're also confident that all the juicy insider knowledge he has from working at TSMC won't have gone unnoticed by GF during the interview process.
