Type | Public |
---|---|
Traded as | NASDAQ: PMCS |
Industry | fabless semiconductor company |
Founded | 1984 |
Headquarters | Sunnyvale, California |
Key people | CEO, and President: Greg Lang Chairman: Robert L. "Bob" Bailey |
Employees |
1,100 employees: design, technical, marketing and sales teams throughout North America, Europe, Israel and Asia[2] PMC-Sierra |
PMC-Sierra is a fabless semiconductor company which develops and sells devices into the communications, storage, printing, and embedded computing marketplaces.
Contents |
Sierra Semiconductor was originally founded in 1984 in San Jose, California, and went public in 1991. It received funding on 1/11/1984 from Sequoia Capital.
Pacific Microelectronics Centre (Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada) was spun off from Microtel Pacific Research (the research arm of BC TEL at the time) to develop ATM and later SONET chips. With investment from Sierra Semiconductor, PMC was established in 1992 as a private company focused on providing networking semiconductors, and became a wholly owned, independently operated subsidiary of Sierra Semiconductor in 1994. Microtel is currently a part of Verizon.
In August 1996, Sierra Semiconductor announced its decision to exit the personal computer modem chipset business, to restructure its other non-networking products and focus on its networking products. In 1997, the Company changed its name to PMC-Sierra to reflect the corporate focus on internetworking semiconductor solutions.
In May 2006, PMC-Sierra acquired Passave, Inc., a developer of system-on-chip semiconductor solutions for the Fiber to the home (FTTH) access market in a stock-for-stock transaction valued at approximately $300 million. Passave was headquartered in Boston, MA and had a development center in Tel Aviv, Israel.[3]
On October 22, 2010 PMC-Sierra acquired Wintegra Inc. for $240m. Wintegra had 165 employees with the majority of its R&D development team located in Raanana, Israel, and Austin, Texas.[4]
PMC-Sierra provides broadband communications and storage semiconductors for metro, access, fiber to the home, wireless infrastructure, enterprise and channel storage, laser printers and customer premises equipment. PMC has more than 250 different semiconductor devices[5] that are sold to equipment manufacturers, who in turn supply their equipment to communications network service providers and enterprises. PMC-Sierra is a “fabless” semiconductor company. The company designs and tests products, but outsources wafer fabrication and assembly functions to third party suppliers.
PMC-Sierra's customers include: HP, EMC, Huawei, Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, ZTE and Juniper.
The company competes against established semiconductor companies that focus on the communications and storage semiconductor business. These companies include Agere Systems, Applied Micro Circuits Corporation, Broadcom, Exar Corporation, Conexant Systems, LSI, Marvell Technology Group, Mindspeed, Transwitch and Vitesse Semiconductor. Other competitors include major domestic and international semiconductor companies, such as Agilent, Freescale, Intel, IBM, Infineon, Motorola, NEC, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba.
For storage networks and systems, PMC-Sierra offers solutions featuring signal integrity, flexibility and diagnostics for increased system performance and management.[6] The company provides an interconnect and controller product family for both 3G and 6G SAS/SATA storage systems and Server RAID. PMC-Sierra also provides 4G and 8G Fibre Channel controller and system interconnect products for SAN/NAS storage and switch fabric applications.
PMC-Sierra has acquired the channel storage business from Adaptec.
PMC-Sierra offers a broad range of interoperable communication ICs scaling from DS-0 to OC-192 for metro access, metro transport, FTTH/PON, Ethernet over SONET/SDH, Optical Transport Network (OTN) and wireless base transceiver stations (BTS).[7] PMC is also enabling the OTN transport market with its HyPHY and META devices at 10G and 20G. PMC has more than 150 devices that help OEMs provide carrier-class solutions.
PMC-Sierra semiconductor devices allow wireless service providers to deploy 2G, 2.5G and 3G wireless equipment.[8] PMC-Sierra's wireless solutions are designed to comply with current and emerging CDMA and WCDMA industry specifications.
PMC-Sierra is the leader in gigabit EPON solutions for Fiber to the Home broadband access network equipment. PMC-Sierra is the only supplier to support EPON (IEEE 802.3ah Ethernet in the First Mile), 10G EPON (IEEE 802.3av) and GPON (ITU-T G.984) standards. PMC-Sierra system-on-chip solutions provide end-to-end gigabit per second bandwidth solutions linking central office equipment and customer premise equipment. OLT (optical line terminal) devices connect the central office to the PON network and ONU or ONT devices connect customer premises to the PON network.
PMC-Sierra has discrete and system-on-chip solutions for both laser and multi-function printers. Performance scalable microprocessors from 250 MHz to 1 GHz, solutions are used by manufacturers of laser printers and multi-function printers.
PMC-Sierra's workforce has grown over the last five years to 1,100 employees through active hiring, recruitment and acquisitions.[9] PMC-Sierra lists open positions on their website.[10]
As of 2009, PMC-Sierra Global presence includes:
USA Corporate Head Office in Sunnyvale, CA
Canada Operations Head Office in Burnaby, B.C.
ASIA International Head Office in Penang, Malaysia
Design Centres
Sales Centre
Design and Sales centres
The company, like several tech companies, has experienced restructurings to meet the current demands on the market.
Date | Number of Employees Affected |
---|---|
August 1996 | 150 people [11] |
June 1997 | PMC Sierra overtook its parent, Sierra Semiconductor [12] |
2001 | 350 people or 24% of total workforce.[13][14] |
January 2003 | 176 people [15] |
June 2005 | 89 people [16] |
January 2006 | 30 people |
August 2006 | 30 to 40 people [17] |
March 2007 | 175 people [18] |
December 2007 | 18 people [19] |
March 2010 | 9 people |