SanDisk Founder Sanjay Mehrotra Is Micron’s New Chief

Micron’s hunt for its next chief executive has ended with the company hiring Sanjay Mehrotra, the founder and former chief of memory chip rival SanDisk. The move, unveiled Thursday, ends the three-month effort to find a replacement for current chief Mark Durcan, who announced his retirement in February.

The changing of the guard – effective May 8 – is not without uncertainties. Micron is enjoying soaring prices for its DRAM and NAND flash chips, but the memory market is staring down new competition in China and chasing new categories of memory like 3D XPoint and carbon nanotubes.

Mehrotra, 58, is an elder statesman in the memory business. SanDisk, the company he founded with Eli Harari and Jack Yuan in 1988, made flash memory for cameras and other gadgets into an inexpensive product now sold next to chewing gum and tabloids at grocery stores. NAND flash is special for saving information even after losing power.

Mehrotra, who stayed close to SanDisk’s engineering team for over two decades, become chief executive when Harari retired from the role in 2011. In the next five years, he revitalized the business by shifting its NAND memory off store shelves and into solid-state drives for servers. Its good fortunes continued until Western Digital bought it in late 2015 for $19 billion.

Durcan’s role as chief executive of Micron also lasted five years. Durcan, 55, steered the Boise, Idaho-based firm through choppy financial waters that resulted from low prices for its memory chips. Because the chips are largely interchangeable, prices change based on supply and demand, not unlike those for dairy or steel.

Last year, Micron struggled mightily to counteract the falling prices of its short-term computer memory and long-term storage for data centers. It announced that it would cut 7.5% of its 32,000-person staff. The cutbacks, it said, would save an estimated $300 million, softening a 25% decline last year in third quarter sales.

In contrast, Mehrotra is taking the reins with memory prices surging. IC Insights, a semiconductor research firm in Scottsdale, Arizona, projects a 37% rise in the average selling price of DRAM, up last year from a 12% decline, and an increase of 22% increase in average selling price of NAND flash, up from a 1% decline last year.

Durcan also escorted several new types of memory out of Micron. Last year, the company started selling 3D NAND in enterprise products and shared details of its Quantx chips, which are based on the secretive 3D XPoint memory it devised with Intel. The chips, it says, have four times the capacity of DRAM and ten times lower latency than NAND.

In 2015, Durcan tiptoed through a $23 billion buyout offer from China’s Tsinghua Unigroup, the public face of Beijing’s ambitions to become a memory superpower. With virtually zero-chance of regulatory approval, Micron quietly declined. But the episode underscored the looming threat of China’s domestic chip industry.

The country is investing heftily to increase production. Tsinghua, which has hired the former chief of Micron’s Inotera Memories unit, is building a $30 billion memory fab in Nanjing, where it hopes foreign language schools and other perks will lure engineering talent. The factory will make DRAM and flash storage chips.

For now, it appears that Mehrotra will be tasked with keeping Micron on course. “The board is not looking to revise Micron’s direction, but rather to ensure we continue to invest in areas of the business that will accelerate Micron’s market and technology position,” Micron said in a statement.

But the company seems confident that Mehrotra is the right person for that job. “Sanjay has an outstanding track record of business success and exceptional knowledge of the memory and storage industry,” said Robert E. Switz, the chairman of Micron’s board, in a statement.

Mehrotra, who holds more than 70 patents, has also served as SanDisk’s the chief operating officer, head of engineering, and chief of product development. He was also the architect of SanDisk’s 17-year partnership on NAND flash manufacturing with Toshiba, the inventor of the technology.

With the change in roles, Durcan is planning to retire. He joined the memory business as a process integration engineer in 1984, climbing the ranks to chief technology officer and later president. In 2012, Durcan postponed his retirement to take over for chief executive Steve Appleton, who died in an airplane crash in Boise.

Durcan will step down as chief executive and from Micron’s board early next month, but he will serve as an advisor to the company into August. Mehrotra will split time between Micron’s offices in Milpitas – a few miles from SanDisk’s California headquarters – and Boise.

"Innovation in memory and storage technology is enabling new products, improved customer experience and growth across multiple markets," Mehrotra said in a press statement. “I am thrilled to have the opportunity to lead such a talented global team.”

from Electronic Design - Engineering Essentials Curated By Experts http://bit.ly/2oFVsE0