Dov Frohman - Creating Intel Israel

Creating Intel Israel

After inventing the EPROM, Frohman left Intel to teach electrical engineering at the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana. He returned to Intel in 1973, but his long-term vision was to return to Israel to create a center of high-tech research there. So in 1974, he went back to Israel where he helped Intel establish a small chip design center in Haifa—Intel’s first outside the United States. On his return to Israel, Frohman taught at the School of Applied Sciences at Hebrew University (which he eventually came to direct) and consulted to Intel on the side. But in 1985, after having negotiated for Intel with the Israeli government to establish a semiconductor fabrication plant in Jerusalem, Intel’s first outside the United States, he left Hebrew University to become general manager of Intel Israel.

Over the next fifteen years, Frohman worked to establish Intel Israel as an important global center of excellence for Intel Corporation. In 1991, during the First Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq attacked Israel with Scud missiles, Frohman kept Intel Israel open—despite recommendations from the Israel Civil Defense authority that all non-essential businesses close down. As a result, Intel Israel was one of the few businesses—and the only manufacturing business—in the country to remain open throughout the entire war. (Frohman has described his experience during the war in an article in the Harvard Business Review.) In 1995, he led Intel’s efforts to establish a second semiconductor fab in Israel, in the town of Qiryat Gat in the south of Israel on the edge of the Negev Desert.

Today, Intel Israel is the headquarters for the corporation’s global R&D for wireless technology (it developed the company’s Centrino mobile computing technology, which powers millions of laptops worldwide) and is responsible for designing the company’s most advanced microprocessor products. It is also a major center for chip fabrication. In 2008, the company opened a second semiconductor fab in Qiryat Gat, one of the most advanced facilities in the world. A $3.5 billion investment, the project was the largest construction project in the history of the state of Israel. With some seven thousand employees (projected to reach nearly ten thousand by the end of 2008), Intel Israel is the country’s largest private employer. In 2007, Intel Israel’s exports totaled $1.4 billion and represented roughly 8.5 percent of the total exports of Israel’s electronics and information industry (which themselves equaled about a quarter of Israel’s total industrial exports—the highest percentage for high tech anywhere in the world).