Applied Micro Circuits has a new name and a new direction.
Company officials announced Nov. 30 that the new name is AppliedMicro and
that they are looking to push farther into the semiconductor space currently
dominated by the likes of Intel, Samsung Electronics, Qualcomm and Advanced
Micro Devices.
AppliedMicro is expecting that its ability to design semiconductor devices
that use up to 50 percent less power than competing products will enable it to
gain traction in the competitive market, according to President and CEO
Paramesh Gopi.
“While higher performance continues to be an industry driver, energy
efficiency will play a more prominent role in the design considerations and
purchasing decisions for our customers in the data center and telecommunications
industries,” Gopi said in a statement. AppliedMicro’s innovation will
“radically lower the energy consumption of enterprise, data center and small
business systems while simultaneously providing significant cost savings.”
The company is looking to leverage its current intellectual property,
patents and engineering capabilities to design and build semiconductor products
for a variety of sectors, from network switches and routers to data center
systems.
The company cited the move to an open foundry manufacturing process for its
chips and migration of its designs to 40 and 28 nanometers as examples of its
efforts to create highly efficient and cost-effective semiconductor products.
AppliedMicro also is opening new design centers in India
and Vietnam.
“We are breaking new ground by applying mobile and handheld design
techniques to telecommunications and infrastructure silicon solutions,
producing unprecedented energy efficiencies without compromising performance,”
Gopi said. “AppliedMicro will set new standards for low-power, ultra-high-performance
processors, framers, mappers, physical layer and optical data center devices
that will drive a new era of energy-efficient infrastructure.”
Gopi spearheaded the transition shortly after taking over as CEO
in January, according to company officials. AppliedMicro sold its 3ware storage
division to concentrate on its fabless semiconductor business.
Like most sectors of the IT industry, the semiconductor business took a hit
from the global recession, but it appears
to be rebounding.
According to a report from research firm iSuppli Nov. 23, overall revenue in
the space for 2009 will drop 12.4 percent. However, iSuppli—after seeing
revenue plummet in the last quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of this
year—initially had predicted a revenue decline of more than 20 percent for
2009.
Fueling the rebound has been demand for memory and chips for consumer
electronics and wireless devices, according to iSuppli.
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