Wilfred Corrigan
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Wilfred J. Corrigan is a British
engineer Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who Invention, invent, design, build, maintain and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials. They aim to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while ...
and
entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value in ways that generally entail beyond the minimal amount of risk (assumed by a traditional business), and potentially involving values besides simply economic ones. An entreprene ...
, known for founding and running LSI Logic Corp. He was the chairman and chief executive of LSI for over two decades until 2005, during the earlier part of which he made vital contributions to the company. He was the founder and served twice as chairman of the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). Corrigan is a veteran of Fairchild Semiconductor.


Life and career

He was born in
Liverpool Liverpool is a port City status in the United Kingdom, city and metropolitan borough in Merseyside, England. It is situated on the eastern side of the River Mersey, Mersey Estuary, near the Irish Sea, north-west of London. With a population ...
,
England England is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is located on the island of Great Britain, of which it covers about 62%, and List of islands of England, more than 100 smaller adjacent islands. It ...
, as the son of a dock worker, graduated with a degree in chemical engineering from the Imperial College of Science before starting his career at Motorola Semiconductor. He later joined Fairchild Semiconductor, rising through the ranks to eventually become president and CEO for five years. He left Fairchild in 1979 after selling the then ailing company to Schlumberger, an oilfield services firm. As the founder of LSI Logic, Corrigan pioneered modern-day
gate array A gate array is an approach to the design and manufacture of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) using a semiconductor device fabrication, prefabricated chip with components that are later interconnected into logic devices (e.g. NAN ...
, standard-cell
application-specific integrated circuit An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC ) is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use, such as a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficienc ...
(ASIC), system-on-a-chip and platform ASIC businesses. Before founding LSI Logic, Corrigan spearheaded the growth of Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation as chairman, president, and
chief executive officer A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization. CEOs find roles in variou ...
and earlier as its vice president and general manager of its Semiconductor Division. Corrigan is also an inventor and holds two U.S.
patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...
s related to field-effect device manufacturing and gas etching. In 1990, Corrigan testified before the United States House Committee on Energy and Commerce about foreign competition in semiconductor manufacture. He is a recipient of the SIA's Robert N. Noyce Medal, Semico Research's Bellwether Award and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group's Lifetime Achievement Award. He also is a member of the board of directors of the Semiconductor Industry Association, a Fellow of the
Royal Academy of Engineering The Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) is the United Kingdom's national academy of engineering. The Academy was founded in June 1976 as the Fellowship of Engineering with support from Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who became the first senio ...
,
Imperial College London Imperial College London, also known as Imperial, is a Public university, public research university in London, England. Its history began with Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, who envisioned a Al ...
and London's City and Guild Institute and a driving force in the establishment of the World Semiconductor Council.


References


External links


Bio and photo
IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal Recipient, 2005 * Oral History available from Silicon Genesis Project at Stanford University Year of birth missing (living people) Alumni of Imperial College London British electrical engineers Businesspeople from Liverpool Engineers from Liverpool Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering Living people {{UK-engineer-stub