GLOBALFOUNDRIES today announced the appointment of Ron Dickinson as vice president of enterprise quality. The appointment marks the completion of the senior management team, cementing a strong leadership base to support the long-term growth and success of GLOBALFOUNDRIES as it aims to reshape the foundry landscape. In his role, Dickinson will enhance the customer experience by driving maximum levels of quality assurance and reliability for internal and external areas across the business.

"To become the industry's premier global foundry company, we need to execute on an uncompromised standard of excellence when it comes to quality management," said GLOBALFOUNDRIES CEO Doug Grose. "Ron brings nearly three decades of world-class experience to help us achieve this goal by implementing a program that consistently meets and exceeds industry-leading benchmarks in efficiency, yields, quality, and cost."

Dickinson will develop and implement a quality strategy and underlying processes, driving continuous process improvement across the company and streamlining processes by eliminating variation and increasing productivity. He will initially be based at Fab 1 in Dresden, Germany, and will transition to New York in the near future to oversee the assembly of a quality organization to support Fab 2-a $4.2 billion project to build the world's most advanced semiconductor manufacturing facility.

"The establishment of GLOBALFOUNDRIES is creating a disruption in the industry with tremendous excitement around a new business model for global leading-edge foundry services," Dickinson said. "I look forward to partnering with leaders across the company to drive productivity by developing and leveraging tools on an enterprise-wide basis. Our unyielding commitment to quality will be a key differentiator for our customers."

Dickinson has spent nearly 30 years driving quality and operational excellence in highly competitive semiconductor manufacturing environments. Most recently, he served as director of operations and general manager for Freescale Semiconductor's fab in East Kilbride, Scotland. There, he was responsible for implementing major performance improvements, including reducing operating costs and increasing direct labor productivity. Prior to his tenure at Freescale, Dickinson held numerous quality and operations management roles at Chartered Semiconductor in Singapore-including running Chartered's highest-volume wafer fab-and he had a distinguished engineering career in Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector.

Dickinson holds bachelor's and doctorate degrees in chemistry from the University of Glasgow.