PMC-Sierra

PMC-Sierra was a global fabless semiconductor company with offices worldwide that developed and sold semiconductor devices into the storage, communications, optical networking, printing, and embedded computing marketplaces.

On January 15, 2016, Microsemi Corporation completed the acquisition of PMC-Sierra through Microsemi's subsidiary Lois Acquisition[1] and Microchip Technology completed the acquisition of Microsemi on May 29, 2018.[2]

History

Sierra Semiconductor was founded in 1984 in San Jose, California by James Diller. It received funding on January 11, 1984 from Sequoia Capital, and went public in 1991.

Pacific Microelectronics Centre (PMC) in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, was spun off from Microtel Pacific Research (the research arm of BC TEL at the time) to develop Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and later SONET integrated circuits (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.

Technology

PMC-Sierra provided 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 had more than 250 different semiconductor devices that were sold to equipment manufacturers, who in turn supplied their equipment to communications network service providers and enterprises. As a fabless semiconductor company, PMC-Sierra designed and tested products, with wafer fabrication and assembly outsourced functions to third party suppliers.

Storage

PMC-Sierra offered products for storage networks and systems. The company provided an interconnect and controller product family for SAS and SATA storage systems and server computer RAID controllers. PMC-Sierra provided Fibre Channel controller and system interconnect products. PMC-Sierra acquired the channel storage business from Adaptec. This business was named "Adaptec by PMC" and made SAS/SATA RAID Adapters. In July 2013 PMC completed the acquisition of IDT's Flash controller business[6] and in August 2014 introduced the Flashtec line of non-volatile memory drives.

Communications

PMC-Sierra offered communication ICs for metro access, metro transport, FTTH/PON, Ethernet over SONET/SDH, Optical Transport Network (OTN) and wireless base transceiver stations (BTS). PMC-Sierra sold products for what is known as Ethernet in the first mile, which generally uses a passive optical network to residential areas. PMC-Sierra semiconductor devices allowed wireless service providers to deploy wireless mobile phone network equipment. This included MIPS-based network processors for wireless back haul and radio frequency integrated circuits for wideband radio modules. The company's UniTRX chipsets were highly integrated, low-power RFICs for wideband radio modules that operated in the 400 MHz to 4 GHz frequency range. These solutions addressed the performance requirements of 3GPP and 3GPP2 macro base station radio transceivers with support of multiple standards such as MC-GSM, cdma2000®, WCDMA, and LTE.

The company's DIGI-G4 chipset was PMC's latest OTN processor, and it enabled the transition to 400G line cards in OTN switched metro networks. It is the industry's densest single-chip 4x100G OTN processor with 50 percent less power per port. In March 2015 the PMC DIGI-G4 OTN processor was awarded a Lightwave Innovation Award [7] with the judges citing "...substantial new features, technologies, and capabilities included in the upgrade..."[7]

Printers

PMC-Sierra has discrete and system-on-chip products for both laser and multi-function printers.

type	Public
foundation	January 11, 1984
location city	Sunnyvale, California
location country	United States
key people	Greg Lang (CEO)
industry	Fabless semiconductor company
num employees	1,500
website	http://pmcs.com
defunct	January 15, 2016
fate	Acquired by Microsemi