Teridian Semiconductor
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Teridian Semiconductor or TSC is a fabless semiconductor company designing and selling mixed-signal ICs, located in Irvine, California.
[edit] Products
Teridian makes network products, especially Ethernet physical-layer integrated circuits, and single-chip telephone modems. Teridian also makes smart-card ICs. Finally, there are some specialized products for electric power meters. TSC also has a few specialized audio visual ICs.
[edit] Brief History
Teridian, commonly abbreviated "TSC," was formed on April 8, 2005 in a leveraged buyout arranged by Golden Gate Capital, a venture capital firm.
TSC is the former semiconductor division of TDK Corporation, which profited from TSC in the early 1990s, and invested heavily in TSC up until divestiture in 2005. There are rumours among investors that divestiture may have been forced because TDK booked good-will in excess of limits imposed by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. This is believed to be a common practice in Japan, to improve the bank credit ratios of a corporation.
Earlier, TSC was part of Silicon Systems of Tustin, California, and still has substantial intellectual property, equipment, employees and organizational memory from that era. A large part of the original Silicon Systems organization was concerned with specialized ICs for disk drives, and that business was sold to Texas Instruments. A consent agreement prevented further sales of disk-drive ICs.
