SiliconBeat

For those of you wondering about that green meat being served today in your company cafeterias, here’s a newsflash. It’s St. Patrick’s Day, which is why SiliconBeat is bringing you this item.

The San Jose-Dublin Sister City Program has presented its 2009 Spirit of Ireland Award to none other than T. J. Rodgers, chief executive officer of San Jose chip-maker Cypress Semiconductor.

What earned him this honor? Here’s how the company’s press release put it:

“Rodgers was instrumental in founding Cypress’s Irish Design Center in Blackrock, Cork, in an effort to establish closer ties with one of the most significant pools of semiconductor design talent outside Silicon Valley. Rodgers and Cypress have also made a commitment to hiring from Irish universities: Over 80% of the Cork staff has graduated from Irish schools, including the University College Cork.”

So there you have it. Oh by the way, if that green meat is still being served next week, you might want to order something else.

While Sunnyvale computer-chipmaker Spansion this week stirred outrage by firing 3,000 workers and then boosting some executives’ pay, Cypress Semiconductor responded to the economic slowdown a little differently.

The San Jose-based Cypress cut its top executives’  2009 salaries along with that of its other employees,.according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. That included trimming the pay of Chief Executive T. J. Rodgers.

Rodgers and his top managers will have their base salaries slashed on a sliding scale ranging from 9 percent to 11 percent. Plus, they won’t get an annual bonus for 2008 and will forfeit the fourth-quarter bonus the company typically hands out when times are good.

Cypress spokesman Joseph McCarthy wouldn’t disclose the size of the pay cut for the company’s rank and file, but said it was less than for the top honchos.

“It’s a democratic salary cut,” McCarthy noted. “This is tough on all of us.”

Cypress Semiconductor will be cutting pay of “all applicable employees, including executive officers” on a sliding scale, at the beginning of its next fiscal quarter. In connection with the plan, executives will have their base salary reduced between 9 percent and 11 percent, the San Jose chip maker said in a filing today.

In the same filing, the company also reported that, after evaluating the company’s financial performance and each executive’s performance in relation to Read the rest of this entry »

Cypress Semiconductor finally got the $10.3 million it had invested in money market funds with the American Beacon Fund, according to a Friday filing.  In September the San Jose chip maker disclosed that the fund had frozen following a “significant increase in redemption orders.”

Not that Cypress was in any immediate need of the funds. As of Sept. 30, the company reported having about $628 million in cash and short-term investments. By the way, that roughly $30 million more than the entire company was valued by Wall Street at the close of trading last Friday.

No wonder its chief executive, TJ Rodgers, has been buying its shares.

The board of directors at Cypress Semiconductor gave Chief Executive T. J. Rodgers a “discretionary bonus” worth $100,000 last month, primarily in recognition of the company’s “successful spin-off of SunPower,” an event that took place in 2006, according to a regulatory filing made today. Cypress shareholders finally received their pay-out from the deal in September when the company divided its majority holding of SunPower stock among Cypress’s own shareholders.

Rather than paying Rodgers in cash, however, Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, the board of directors at Cypress Semiconductor set up a committee that will be authorized to approve the distribution to its stockholders of the shares it owns of SunPower, the maker of chips used in the generation of solar energy that it spun out into a separate company in 2005.

The special committee is expected to approve the distribution after the Securities and Exchange Commission completes its review of SunPower’s preliminary information statement filed with the SEC on Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, Cypress Semiconductor sold 2.5 million shares of SunPower, the company it spun-off into a separate public entity in November 2005, reducing its ownership stake by 5.6 percent. Cypress continues to be SunPower’s single biggest stockholder, with 42 million shares, or 52.3 percent of SunPower shares outstanding, according to a filing with the SEC today.

The shares were sold to a private investor. The amount of the transaction was not detailed. SunPower shares rose 18 percent last Friday Read the rest of this entry »