SiliconBeat

How long would Ken Klein (pictured), the chief executive at Wind River Systems, stick around should the Alameda supplier of embedded software become a division of the world’s largest chip maker? No one can say for sure, but two years would seem to be a relatively safe bet. That’s how long Klein needs to remain with the company in order to receive all of a $5 million retention bonus promised him as part of the merger agreement with Intel, which offered to buy Wind River last week for $11.50 a share in a deal it valued at $884 million.

Details of Klein’s hiring agreement were filed Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission along with Read the rest of this entry »

Spansion, the Sunnyvale flash memory maker that gave its executives a retention-based pay raise in February the same day it fired 3,000 workers, said this week that one of those raises doesn’t seem to have had the desired effect.

The company revealed in a regulatory filing Thursday that one of the recipients of those executive retention pay raises quit a week ago. Dario Sacomani (pictured), the company’s now former chief financial officer, resigned April 10, when he and Spansion entered into a “Personal Leave Agreement” under which Read the rest of this entry »

A monthly update from Challenger, Gray & Christmas on CEO departures should be kept in mind the next time we come across some form of “retention” compensation offered to a chief executive.

The number of chief executives leaving companies “nosedived” in February to 83, the lowest monthly rate since Read the rest of this entry »

In addition to the $3.5 million signing bonus Dell gave Ron Garriques when he was hired to be president of its global consumer group in February 2007, the computer maker also agreed to give him a restricted stock grant every year that was to be worth six times his annual base salary of $700,000 every year through fiscal 2012. It also promised him $3 million in cash that was to be paid out in three equal payments over three years from his original hire date.

Just over two years into his employment, he and the company entered into a “Retention Bonus, Merger and Modification Agreement” that gives him $2 million outright in exchange for Read the rest of this entry »

When LSI purchased Agere Systems in 2007, it agreed to maintain roughly the same benefits to former Agere executive for a period of two years with a plan to have a unified perquisite program for all executive officers in 2009.

However, last week LSI agreed to extend special benefits for an additional year for one former Agere executive, Andrew Micallef, who now serves as LSI’s executive vice president in charge of worldwide manufacturing, according to a filing today with the SEC. The benefits are related to his location in Singapore and are “intended to allow individuals receiving its benefits to work in a country other than their home country and experience a similar standard of living to what they could experience in their home country.”

What does that entail? For Micallef, the extra benefits include: Read the rest of this entry »