AMCC becomes AppliedMicro

SUNNYVALE, USA: Applied Micro Circuits Corp., a global leader in energy conscious computing and communications solutions, today announced its new name as AppliedMicro to reflect the company’s drive for breakthrough energy efficiency and cost optimized semiconductor devices that will propel the company into new growth markets.

In keeping with the 30-year AMCC heritage as an innovator in high-speed connectivity and high performance embedded processing, AppliedMicro will remain dedicated to its customers in the telco, datacenter and enterprise markets, while increasing market share by striving to reduce the power consumption of its products by as much as 50 percent.

“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,” said Dr. Paramesh Gopi, President and Chief Executive Officer of AppliedMicro.

“We are driving fundamental technology innovation that will radically lower the energy consumption of enterprise, datacenter and small business systems while simultaneously providing significant cost savings. Our computing and communications silicon solutions will have pioneering performance and the lowest power footprint in their class.”

Under the new name, AppliedMicro will leverage its substantial intellectual property, patent portfolio and engineering resources to pursue aggressive migration to advanced manufacturing processes and design techniques for its semiconductor devices that lead the market in optical transport, network switches and, routers, data center and enterprise systems.

A migration to open foundry manufacturing for AppliedMicro’s Power Architecture microprocessor line is also one example of the company’s drive toward low-power devices that will enable the company to achieve lower costs for its products and open up design opportunities for consumer and small-to-medium business systems.

In addition, new design centers in India and Vietnam will assist the company in bringing advanced hardware and software solutions to market as most of the company’s engineering resources remain at its Sunnyvale headquarters.

“Growth in both the embedded systems and communications infrastructure markets are predicted at fairly robust growth rates over the next five years according to IDC research,” said Shane Rau, industry analyst for IDC. “Integrated circuits for systems in this market that feature low heat dissipation levels are drawing higher interest because a major industry goal is to reduce data center operating costs by using less air conditioning.”

“Our plan to rapidly migrate our IC designs to 40-nanometer and 28-nanometer manufacturing processes is a key part of our strategy to introduce the most advanced, power efficient devices on the market,” Gopi said.

“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. Applied Micro will set new standards for low-power ultra-high performance processors, framers, mappers, physical layer and optical datacenter devices that will drive a new era of energy efficient infrastructure.”

The shift to the AppliedMicro name began when Gopi assumed the executive leadership of the company in January after serving for one year as the chief operating officer.

The company sold its 3ware storage system division so that it could concentrate on its fabless semiconductor business model. New executive leadership was also brought in to help the company focus on advances in microprocessor and transport development. The company’s legal name remains Applied Micro Circuits Corporation and its ticker symbol on the NASDAQ exchanges remains AMCC.