Ajit Manocha

Ajit Manocha is the president and CEO of SEMI, the global industry association serving the semiconductor and electronics manufacturing and design supply chain.  Throughout his career, Manocha has been a champion of industry collaboration as a critical means of advancing technology for societal and economic prosperity.
In his leadership role at SEMI, Manocha has broadened the association’s scope to fuel industry growth and foster
collaboration on challenges such as geopolitical and sustainability concerns, the talent gap and supply chain disruptions. He has driven SEMI to evolve with the global microelectronics ecosystem as it rapidly expands to support smarter, connected applications based on artificial intelligence, machine learning and other disruptive technologies.
Manocha was formerly CEO at GlobalFoundries. Prior to this, he held the role of Executive VP of worldwide operations at Spansion and earlier served as Executive VP and chief manufacturing officer (chief operations officer) at Philips Semiconductors. He began his career at AT&T Bell Laboratories as a research scientist and was granted more than a dozen patents related to
semiconductor manufacturing processes that served as the foundation for modern microelectronics manufacturing. He has served on the boards of SEMI, the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) and Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA).
Manocha has overseen the formation of more than 20 joint ventures and M&As over his career. Out of these, some of the most noteworthy are the manufacturing JV between AT&T and Cirrus Logic, the foundry JV SSMC between Philips Semiconductors and TSMC, the back-end JV Suzhou ASEN Semiconductors between Philips Semiconductors and ASE, and the spinoff of
Philips Semiconductors (now NXP Semiconductors) from Royal Philips Electronics.
Manocha served on President Obama’s committees for “Advanced Manufacturing Partnerships” and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science & Technology (PCAST).
Manocha holds the rare distinction of being inducted into two Hall of Fames. In 2021, VLSI research (now TechInsights) added Manocha to its Semiconductor Industry Hall of Fame for his leadership of SEMI efforts to address geopolitical trade tensions as well as for his initiative in navigating the many challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic impacting SEMI and the microelectronics industry. In 2020, Manocha was inducted into the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame, and VLSIresearch named him an “All Star of the Semiconductor Industry” for his visionary leadership in 2019 to restructure SEMI to represent the expanded electronics supply chain.