Last month, troubled handset maker Sony-Ericsson appointed a new president and reshuffled its board in an attempt to revive its flagging fortunes.

Bert Nordberg, the head of Ericsson in Silicon Valley, will take up the role of co-president of the Swedish-Japanese venture midway through a major turnaround programme.

Hideki "Dick" Komiyama, Sony Ericsson's president will retire at the end of the year.

Sir Howard Stringer, the Sony president responsible for a sweeping cost-cutting exercise at the Japanese company, has been appointed chairman of the board, taking over the role from Carl-Henric Svanberg, the president and chief executive of Ericsson, on October 15.

Svanberg himself is due to leave the Ericsson hot seat by the end of the year, for perhaps an even tougher role as CEO of oil group BP, to be replaced by Hans Vestberg.

Dutheil steps down as chief executive of ST-Ericsson after seven months at the helm of the newly created wireless chip group, and will return to STMicroelectronics as chief operating officer.

In an interview with EE Times Europe earlier this year, Dutheil hinted that his mission was to take the company through its crucial period of formation and then hand over to a successor.

The musical chairs at ST-Ericsson — which also includes in its wide portfolio of wireless chips and systems those from NXP Semiconductors, following the earlier merger between STMicroelectronics and NXP — follows a major reshuffle in the lower ranks late July.

So Delfassy, a 28-year veteran of Texas Instruments, from which he retired in 2007, will have a whole load of factors to juggle as he takes over, not least a plethora of products and technologies that urgently need to be streamlined and to focus on segments where there is the greatest growth potential.

When he left, Delfassy was senior vice president and head of TI's wireless terminals unit. Under his leadership, TI developed the OMAP platform, which must be one of his major achievements.

He will need to keep current large handset customers on board and perhaps bring on new ones such as Apple and BlackBerry, where his U.S. experience and recent role as an adviser and consultant to several companies will be most relevant.

And on or near the top of the list must be to gain scale and see off new challengers like Intel, while formulating strategy for new categories like smartbooks, netbooks, MIDs and embedded wireless.

Although he left TI before the company decided to exit from most of its cellphone baseband activities, Delfassy will be well aware of the challenges in this amazingly fast-changing wireless segment, where Qualcomm is becoming increasingly dominant and where there is low end competition from Taiwanese group MediaTek and others.