The game of CEO musical chairs continued today as Nanosolar announced that Geoff Tate, formerly of AMD and Rambus, will take over the company from co-founder Martin Roscheisen. Nanosolar, which keeps costs low by printing its thin-film copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) solar cells, offered no reason for Roscheisen’s departure.
The last few weeks have seen some sudden changes in solar companies’ executive suites, notably the departures of Solar Millennium’s Utz Claassen and Q-Cells’ Anton Milner.
Earth2Tech’s Katie Fehrenbacher notes that it’s not uncommon for green energy company founders to make way for professional managers as the enterprise ramps up its production efforts.
Tate was the chief executive of Rambus, which designs high-speed chip interfaces, between 1990 and 2005, and worked in multiple executive roles at chipmaker AMD for ten years prior to that.
Greentech Media reports that Tate was “once one of the most feared guys in Silicon Valley” because Rambus was a “pure intellectual-property company” that licensed its memory to other manufacturers and sued several companies.