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Applied Micro Circuits Corporation (NASDAQ: AMCC) is a fabless semiconductor company designing network and embedded Power Architecture (including a Power Architecture license), optical transport and storage solutions. They bought assets, IP and engineers concerning the PowerPC 400 microprocessors from IBM in 2004 for $227 million and they now market the processors under their own name. The deal also included access to IBM's SoC design methodology and advanced CMOS process technology.

AMCC has a sponsor level membership of Power.org and is one of the original members. AMCC is also executive member (Chairman position) of the Ethernet Alliance.

Business Units

Processor business group

This Processor business designs and markets embedded microcontroller as well as packet and storage processors. It combines the network processors of former MMC Networks (acquired October 2000) with IBM PowerPC 4xx series microcontrollers (acquired April 2004).

Since purchasing the IBM PowerPC 400 family (under the 405 and 440 series product names), AMCC has developed the 460 series and a multicore Power architecture CPU (Titan, formerly MultiGHz, announced early in 2007).

In January 2008, the AMCC PowerPC 405EX was awarded PRODUCT OF THE YEAR 2007, by Electronic Product Magazine.

Also in January 2008, AMCC announced an extension of its relationship with IBM Semiconductor; IBM now incorporates the AMCC PowerPC 4xx product line in its Semiconductor Solutions offering. Under this expanded relationship, AMCC and IBM’s Semiconductor Solutions sales forces both market AMCC’s PowerPC 4xx products. AMCC has added customers like Accusys and Qlogic to its large customer base for its PowerPC product line.

Transport

The Transport Business Unit with AMCC designs, manufacturers and markets physical layer devices, framers/mappers and switch fabric devices. AMCC has also a strong 10Gbit/s Physical layer devices portfolio and currently lead 10GBPS PHY market. Recently AMCC announced (01/29/2008) PEMAQUID / S19258, a XAUI-to-XFI 10G LAN/WAN/OTN Framer/Mapper/PHY device for 10GbE, 10G Fibre Channel, WIS (OC-192/STM-64) and OTU2 network applications. The PEMAQUID (S19258) represents AMCC’s first device in its MEtrON (Metro Ethernet Optical Networks) product family that is designed for Metro Ethernet and Carrier Grade Ethernet solutions systems. PEMAQUID enables cost-effective Carrier Ethernet solutions for the Metro WDM Transport Network.

Acquisitions

Throughout the years, AMCC has acquired smaller companies to enter new markets.

Competitors

1. Broadcom
2. Intel
3. TI
4. Freescale

References

External links

• AMCC Corporate website