Huge layoff to follow.
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He plans to execute exactly the strategy he took with Motorola. He will sell all the patents to Google, shut Qualcomm down and sell the leftover pieces to the Chinese, and then jump out of the airplane with another $100M parachute.
He'd be crazy if he was to join now. Too unstable.
Before sanjay, the whole qct used to fit on a single bleacher seat stand for a group photo. Good old days of flip phones.
Why was he fired ?
Can anyone highlight Sanjay jha's accomplishments after qualcomm ( and in qualcomm as a leader) ? He is a good engineer but is he a good leader to lead a soon to be a mega company ?
5 Thoughts on GF and Sanjay Jha
Rick Merritt, SiliconValley Bureau Chief
3/12/2018 00:41 AM EDT
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I don’t know what’s going on with GlobalFoundries’ CEO shift, but here’s a download of all my unwashed speculations for what they are worth.
If you want to make big news seem small, you put it out on a Friday. It’s an old technique and one that GlobalFoundries (GF) used when it announced its change of CEO last week. A skeletal announcement, no interviews, and, with the weekend at hand, little time to think about it.
That made me want to think about it. Perhaps obsess is a better word.
First, I noted that CEOs often are said to “step down” as part of a mutual agreement. We all know the reality is that people usually either quit or are fired.
If Sanjay Jha quit, it could be because he was offered a more attractive job. One commenter speculated that he might be offered the CEO job at Qualcomm.
The idea is kind of crazy, like jumping from the frying pan to the fire given Broadcom’s hostile takeover bid for Qualcomm. Still, it’s not impossible given that Qualcomm is pulling out all the stops to prevent the takeover, and its current CEO is said to be scoring low among candidate board members in the early proxy ballots.
In some ways, the scenario makes sense because Jha used to be the COO of Qualcomm. If Qualcomm gets China’s approval to acquire NXP, which owns a bunch of fabs, Jha’s experience at GF would be welcome.
Another scenario is that Jha quit because he was fed up. This is very plausible given that GF has gone through four CEOs now in less than a decade.
GF’s sole owner, the Mubadala Investment Co. in the United Arab Emirates, is said to be a tough boss, reportedly a former CEO felt hemmed in by handfuls of McKinsey analysts that Mubadala hired, creating an environment of paralysis by analysis.
If Jha was fired, it could have been because he was not hitting his marks. As a former Qualcomm and Motorola Mobility exec, he was expected to help GF win deals to make Snapdragon and other big, high-volume chips. To date, the foundry’s two largest-named customers are still its former parent AMD and IBM, whose chip unit it acquired in 2015. So this scenario seems plausible.
Alternatively, maybe Jha was fired because of a conflict over strategy with the Mubadala-led board. I can think of many reasons why that might be the case.
This year, GF has to write some big checks for EUV steppers. It needs at least two, and maybe as many as five, of the $110+ million machines for its 7-nm+ process.
Look just a little further down the road map and it’s probably time to make plans for a new fab for 5-/3-/2-nm nodes. Rival TSMC announced last year its general plan for a 3-nm fab in Taiwan.
GF has to make these multi-billion-dollar investments soon to keep AMD and IBM happy. However, it is not likely to win over another major high-volume and leading-edge customer such as Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, or Xilinx. TSMC and Samsung give them earlier access to leading-edge nodes, and it’s really, really painful to move to a new foundry.
I hope I’m wrong, but it seems like GF is at a critical moment of needing to double down on its investment with thin hopes of a return. It will probably need to do some serious political arm-twisting to land a good deal for a Fab 9. It also may need to convince one or more top-tier fabless companies to join them to create what would be a pretty risky venture to build one of the last big CMOS fabs.
I don’t know the new GF CEO, Tom Caulfield, though I heard him speak once. As a former head of IBM’s East Fishkill fab and a COO, at least briefly, for two chip startups, I’m sure that he’s a super smart guy. But I don’t see anything in his resume about wrangling financing out of U.S. government types or cutting major deals with fabless companies.
For this kind of work, GF needs its Morris Chang, its Andy Grove. Frankly, I can’t think of anyone in the semiconductor industry ready to fill those shoes. So it seems to me that GF is between a rock and a hard place.
I can imagine a Mubadala investor saying “enough already” and pulling the plug. But the Mubadala rep serving as GF’s board chairman suggested something different in his opaque quote in the press release about investing in the company “to differentiate and grow the business and further consolidate the industry through partnerships.” (Emphasis mine.)
This sounds to me like Mubadala is evaluating deals that fall short of buying another foundry like UMC or Tower but might involve FD-SOI or specialty process nodes — or hot packaging technology like the 2.5D chip stacks or wafer-level fan-out packages that TSMC leads in today. Maybe Jha didn’t buy those ideas and he got his walking papers.
There’s one more wild possibility that comes to mind, and this is the one that I most hope is true. Maybe Jha and Mubadala are on the same sheet of music, and maybe they want to sing China’s song.
Rather than let integrated companies such as Apple and Samsung walk away with all the prizes, they want to play this game, too. Maybe they have studied the lessons of Huawei/HiSilicon, Oppo and Vivo, Baidu, and Tencent.
Maybe Mubadala wants to triple down by starting an integrated OEM/fabless company to make its own smartphones and maybe even servers and services. Indeed, today’s big winners in high tech are the companies with the largest data centers, followed by the integrated systems and silicon OEMs. The foundries ride their coattails even though they play a foundational role.
The difficulty here is that, with a population of less than 400 million spread across more than 20 countries, the Arab world lacks China’s large and unified market. So perhaps this is the wildest idea of them all. Still, it’s a possibility dangled out there in the GF press release that said that Jha will work with Mubadala “to explore the development and build out of potential future systems businesses.”
Japan leveraged high tech to pull itself out of the destruction of WWII. Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore followed in its footsteps. China is taking its giant swing today.
In the Middle East, Israel has grown a vibrant tech industry with help from Intel and many others. So far, the Arab world has not. GF has been its biggest effort to date, and there are more chapters to come in this story. Hopefully, most of them will not break on a Friday.
Welcome back Sanjay. Please do something.
https://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1333060 Is it true ??