[3] His father was a car salesman and worked for General Motors and his mother was a school teacher, with a master's degree in radio electronics.

After finishing a doctorate at Stanford, he turned down a job offer from Intel, saying that CEO Andrew S. Grove was unlikely to give him the freedom to pursue his own projects.

[4] Instead Rodgers accepted a job at American Microsystems, Inc. (AMI), where he continued development of VMOS, but this project was a failure.

[6] Cypress is a semiconductor design and manufacturing company, producing PSoCs, microcontroller, IoT, wireless and USB, PMICs, memory and sensor chips.

[13] After filing a lawsuit against the company in April 2017, Rodgers sought to remove executive chairman Ray Bingham[14][15] and Éric Benhamou from the Cypress board and nominated Dan McCranie and Camillo Martino as directors.

[16] Rodgers argued that Bingham's role as a co-founder of Canyon Bridge,[17] a private equity fund supported by the Government of China,[13] constituted a clear conflict of interest as acquisition targets for both companies overlapped.

[17] Bingham was forced to resign from the Cypress board in early June 2017 and both of Rodgers' nominees won the subsequent 2017 shareholder election against Benhamou.

As SunPower faced financial problems in 2001, Rodgers[19] tried to convince the Cypress board[18] to buy the solar cell producer.

[28] As trustee, Rodgers’ major concerns were removing the College's speech code,[27] increasing the budget for teacher salaries and strengthening Dartmouth's focus on undergraduate education.

Later he bought two additional vineyards and, along with his wife Valeta, Rodgers established the winery Clos de la Tech in the Santa Cruz Mountains of Silicon Valley.

[32] Clos de la Tech's Pinot Noirs have been rated up to 96 points by Wine Enthusiast Magazine.

[43] 1986: 1988: 1996: 1997 2000: 2001: 2002: 2005 : 2006: 2009: 1975 US3878552 – Bipolar Integrated Circuit and Method[46] US3924265 – Low capacitance V groove MOS NOR gate and method of manufacture[47] 1976 US3975221 – Low capacitance V groove MOS NOR gate and method of manufacture[48] 1980 US4222063 – VMOS Floating gate memory with breakdown voltage loweringregion[49] US4222062 – VMOS Floating gate memory device[50] 1981 CA1115426 – U-groove mos device[51] 1988 US5835401 – DRAM with hidden refresh[52] US4764248 – Rapid thermal nitridized oxide locos process[53] 1999 US5977638 – Edge metal for interconnect layers[54] 2000 US6131140 – Integrated cache memory with system control logic and adaptation of RAM bus to a cache pinout[55] 2001 US6185126 – Self-initializing RAM-based programmable device[56] 2004 US6835616 – Method of forming a floating metal structure in an integratedcircuit[57] US6730545 – Method of performing back-end manufacturing of an integrated circuit device[58] US2004076712 – Fermentation tank wine press [59] 2005 US6903002 – Low-k dielectric layer with air gaps[60] US6847218 – Probe card with an adapter layer for testing integrated circuits[61] 2006 US7045387 – Method of performing back-end manufacturing of an integrated circuit[62] 2007 US7227804 – Current source architecture for memory device standby current reduction[63] 2008 US2008315847 – Programmable floating gate reference[64] US2008102160 – Wine-making press[65] 2009 US7507944 – Non-planar packaging of image sensor[66] 2017 US9624094 – Hydrogen barriers in a copper interconnect process[67]