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Company type | Public: |
---|---|
Nasdaq: AMCC | |
Industry | Semiconductors & Related Devices |
Founded | 1979 |
Defunct | January 26, 2017 |
Fate | Acquired by MACOM Technology Solutions |
Headquarters | Santa Clara, California, US |
Key people | Paramesh Gopi (CEO) |
Revenue | US$206 million (FY 2010) [1] |
US$-26.1 million (FY 2010) [1] | |
US$-7.49 million (FY 2010) [1] | |
Total assets | US$316 million (FY 2010) [2] |
Total equity | US$281 million (FY 2010) [2] |
Number of employees | ~600 |
Website | apm Archived May 16, 2016, at the Wayback Machine |
Applied Micro Circuits Corporation (also known as AppliedMicro, AMCC or APM) was a fabless semiconductor company designing network and embedded Power ISA (including a Power ISA license), and server processor ARM (including an ARMv8-A license), optical transport and storage products.
In 2004, AMCC bought assets, IP and engineers concerning the PowerPC 400 microprocessors from IBM for $227 million and began marketing the processors under their own name. [3] The deal also included access to IBM's SoC design methodology and advanced CMOS process technology.
In 2009, AppliedMicro changed their branding from AMCC to AppliedMicro, [4] but still retain the name "Applied Micro Circuits Corporation" officially.
In 2011, AppliedMicro became the first company to implement the ARMv8-A architecture with its X-Gene Platform. In November 2012 at ARM TechCon, AppliedMicro demonstrated advanced web search capabilities and the ability to handle big data workloads in an Apache Hadoop software environment with the X-Gene Platform using FPGA emulation. A silicon implementation of X-Gene was first exhibited publicly in June 2013. [5]
In April 2016, information about the forthcoming X-Gene 3 server chips was made available. The release schedule was for the second half of 2017. The company projected an improved performance, over the X-Gene 2, that with allow it to better compete with servers using the x86-64 architecture. [6]
In November 2016, MACOM Technology Solutions announced that they would purchase AppliedMicro. [7] The acquisition was completed on January 26, 2017. [8] MACOM then sold the processor division to the private equity firm The Carlyle Group during October 2017. [9]
AppliedMicro has a sponsor level membership of Power.org and is one of the original members. AppliedMicro is also executive member (Chairman position) of the Ethernet Alliance. AppliedMicro is also a member of the Open Compute Project.
The Processor Products group designed and marketed embedded microcontrollers as well as server processor, packet and storage processors. It included the network processors of former MMC Networks (acquired October 2000) with IBM PowerPC 4xx series microcontrollers (acquired April 2004).
Since acquiring the IBM PowerPC 400 family (marketed under the 405 and 440 series product names), AppliedMicro further developed the 460 series, which integrates the 440 CPU and multicore Power architecture devices.
In January 2008, the AppliedMicro PowerPC 405EX was awarded Product of the Year 2007, by Electronic Product magazine.
In October 2011, AppliedMicro announced its X-Gene Platform, an ARM 64-bit solution aimed at cloud and enterprise servers. [10]
The Connectivity Products group of AppliedMicro designs, manufacturers and markets physical layer devices, framers/mappers and switch fabric devices.
Throughout the years, AppliedMicro has acquired smaller companies to enter new markets.
Date | Acquired company | Expertise | Amount |
---|---|---|---|
April 1998 | Ten Mountain Design | transceiver design | |
March 1999 | Cimaron Communications | SONET chips | $115M in stock |
April 2000 | Yuni Networks | terabit switch fabrics | $241M in stock |
April 2000 | Chameleon Technologies | Fibre Channel and SONET products | |
April 2000 | PBaud Logic Inc. | SONET and forward-error-correction | |
September 2000 | Silutia | CMOS mixed-signal design | 566,000 shares of stock |
October 2000 | MMC Networks | network processors | $4500M in stock |
March 2001 | Raleigh Technology Corporation (RTC) | Ethernet QoS ASICs [11] | |
September 2003 | PowerPRS product line from IBM | switch fabrics | $47M |
December 2003 | JNI | Fibre Channel products | $196M in cash |
April 2004 | PowerPC 400 series product line from IBM | embedded microprocessors | $227M in cash |
April 2004 | 3ware | RAID controllers | $150M in cash |
August 2006 | Quake Technologies | 10 Gb Ethernet transceivers | $69M in cash |
In 2005, the company paid $60 million to settle a class-action lawsuit on behalf of investors against the company, including current and former officers and directors. [12] The suit had charged the company with issuing a series of materially false and misleading statements concerning the company's operations and prospects for Q4 2001 and beyond. [13] Under the terms of the settlement, the company and defendants denied any wrongdoing. About half of the amount of the settlement was covered by insurance. [12]
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that designs and develops central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), system-on-chip (SoC), and high-performance compute solutions. AMD serves a wide range of business and consumer markets, including gaming, data centers, artificial intelligence (AI), and embedded systems.
PowerPC is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM. PowerPC, as an evolving instruction set, has been named Power ISA since 2006, while the old name lives on as a trademark for some implementations of Power Architecture–based processors.
ARM is a family of RISC instruction set architectures (ISAs) for computer processors. Arm Holdings develops the ISAs and licenses them to other companies, who build the physical devices that use the instruction set. It also designs and licenses cores that implement these ISAs.
The PowerPC 400 family is a line of 32-bit embedded RISC processor cores based on the PowerPC or Power ISA instruction set architectures. The cores are designed to fit inside specialized applications ranging from system-on-a-chip (SoC) microcontrollers, network appliances, application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to set-top boxes, storage devices and supercomputers.
A multi-core processor (MCP) is a microprocessor on a single integrated circuit (IC) with two or more separate central processing units (CPUs), called cores to emphasize their multiplicity. Each core reads and executes program instructions, specifically ordinary CPU instructions. However, the MCP can run instructions on separate cores at the same time, increasing overall speed for programs that support multithreading or other parallel computing techniques. Manufacturers typically integrate the cores onto a single IC die, known as a chip multiprocessor (CMP), or onto multiple dies in a single chip package. As of 2024, the microprocessors used in almost all new personal computers are multi-core.
Microchip Technology Incorporated is a publicly listed American corporation that manufactures microcontroller, mixed-signal, analog, and Flash-IP integrated circuits. Its products include microcontrollers, Serial EEPROM devices, Serial SRAM devices, embedded security devices, radio frequency (RF) devices, thermal, power, and battery management analog devices, as well as linear, interface and wireless products.
Cavium, Inc. was a fabless semiconductor company based in San Jose, California, specializing in ARM-based and MIPS-based network, video and security processors and SoCs. The company was co-founded in 2000 by Syed B. Ali and M. Raghib Hussain, who were introduced to each other by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Cavium offers processor- and board-level products targeting routers, switches, appliances, storage and servers.
Marvell Technology, Inc. is an American company, headquartered in Santa Clara, California, which develops and produces semiconductors and related technology. Founded in 1995, the company had more than 6,500 employees as of 2024, with over 10,000 patents worldwide, and an annual revenue of $5.5 billion for fiscal 2024.
Titan was a planned family of 32-bit Power ISA-based microprocessor cores designed by Applied Micro Circuits Corporation (AMCC), but was scrapped in 2010. Applied Micro chose to continue development of the PowerPC 400 core instead, on a 40 nm fabrication process.
Arm Holdings plc is a British semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge, England, whose primary business is the design of central processing unit (CPU) cores that implement the ARM architecture family of instruction sets. It also designs other chips, provides software development tools under the DS-5, RealView and Keil brands, and provides systems and platforms, system-on-a-chip (SoC) infrastructure and software. As a "holding" company, it also holds shares of other companies. Since 2016, it has been majority owned by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group.
MACOM Technology Solutions, Inc. is a developer and producer of radio, microwave, and millimeter wave semiconductor devices and components. The company is headquartered in Lowell, Massachusetts, and in 2005 was Lowell's largest private employer. MACOM is certified to the ISO 9001 international quality standard and ISO 14001 environmental standard. The company has design centers and sales offices in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.
The ARM Cortex-M is a group of 32-bit RISC ARM processor cores licensed by ARM Limited. These cores are optimized for low-cost and energy-efficient integrated circuits, which have been embedded in tens of billions of consumer devices. Though they are most often the main component of microcontroller chips, sometimes they are embedded inside other types of chips too. The Cortex-M family consists of Cortex-M0, Cortex-M0+, Cortex-M1, Cortex-M3, Cortex-M4, Cortex-M7, Cortex-M23, Cortex-M33, Cortex-M35P, Cortex-M52, Cortex-M55, Cortex-M85. A floating-point unit (FPU) option is available for Cortex-M4 / M7 / M33 / M35P / M52 / M55 / M85 cores, and when included in the silicon these cores are sometimes known as "Cortex-MxF", where 'x' is the core variant.
HiSilicon is a Chinese fabless semiconductor company based in Shenzhen, Guangdong province and wholly owned by Huawei. HiSilicon purchases licenses for CPU designs from ARM Holdings, including the ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore, ARM Cortex-M3, ARM Cortex-A7 MPCore, ARM Cortex-A15 MPCore, ARM Cortex-A53, ARM Cortex-A57 and also for their Mali graphics cores. HiSilicon has also purchased licenses from Vivante Corporation for their GC4000 graphics core.
This is a comparison of ARM instruction set architecture application processor cores designed by ARM Holdings and 3rd parties. It does not include ARM Cortex-R, ARM Cortex-M, or legacy ARM cores.
The ARM Cortex-A76 is a central processing unit implementing the ARMv8.2-A 64-bit instruction set designed by ARM Holdings' Austin design centre. ARM states a 25% and 35% increase in integer and floating point performance, respectively, over a Cortex-A75 of the previous generation.
Ampere Computing LLC is an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California that develops processors for servers operating in large scale environments. It was founded in 2017 by Renée James.
The ARM Neoverse is a group of 64-bit ARM processor cores licensed by Arm Holdings. The cores are intended for datacenter, edge computing, and high-performance computing use. The group consists of ARM Neoverse V-Series, ARM Neoverse N-Series, and ARM Neoverse E-Series.
SemiAccurate has been waiting for one big thing before declaring ARM servers real and AMCC has just delivered that. If you have been waiting for ARM V8 silicon to arrive, may we present to you AMCC X-Gene silicon in the wild.
Raleigh Technology Corporation designs, develops and markets application specific integrated circuits for Ethernet local-area network switches, routers, and gateways. The company's product is aimed at the higher priced, higher margin market for circuits with value-added features. The company's integrated circuits will let large firms with Ethernet local-area networks converge their voice, data, and video networks by providing guaranteed bandwidth to voice and video.