Rick Hetherington

Who is Rick Hetherington?

Rick Hetherington is the chief technology officer for Sun's recently

formed Microelectronics business unit where he sets the technical

direction for Sun's SPARC processor development and related

technologies. Hetherington is driving Sun's leadership in the chip

multithreading (CMT) approach to processor design, in which multiple

cores and multiple threads combine to generate extraordinary throughput

and power efficiency.Prior to his appointment as CTO,

Hetherington provided oversight for the architecture, performance and

roadmap of UltraSPARC T1(TM) processors and systems as chief architect

for Sun's Horizontal Systems group. From 2000 to 2002, Hetherington

took a hiatus from Sun to join a networking start-up as VP of

engineering.Hetherington originally joined Sun in 1996 as

co-architect of Sun's Project Millennium processor. Prior to Sun, he

spent 16 years with Digital Equipment Corp., working on a variety of

VAX and Alpha processors and systems. His last position at Digital was

system architect of EV6 (21264) processor.Hetherington earned his bachelor's degree from Pennsylvania State University and currently holds 47 patents.