perhaps posting this GaAs article would've been more appropriate pre-Notties (read: 2000), but i found it an entertaining read nonetheless. it's lengthy, so for those who believe in brevity, i've culled the VTSS-cited portions below.
for the history buff or near-term VTSS shareholder like myself ... well, near-term being less than a handful of years in my book ...
enjoy,
-chris.
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Electronic Engineering Times
December 27, 1999, Issue: 1093
Section: 2000 - The Century Of The Engineer, Misunderstood Milestones
GaAs ICs: THEY CAME, THEY WENT, THEY CAME
George Rostky
techweb.com
One of the great success-failure-success stories of the semiconductor era involves the gallium arsenide integrated circuit. As a laser or light-emitting device, gallium arsenide, or compounds like gallium arsenide phosphide, enjoyed steady growth. But the story was different with the IC -- and very uneven. Depending on their product orientation and emphasis, some GaAs companies saw relatively steady growth; some suffered steep declines, then recovered; and some died.
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Typical of the up-down-up scenario is the history at Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. Co-founder and CEO Lou Tomasetta came from Rockwell Science Center, a West Coast GaAs pioneer. Vice president and general manager Chris Gardner came from Bell Labs, an East Coast GaAs pioneer.
Founded in 1986, Vitesse started by going up against the ECL gate-array leaders, Motorola and Fujitsu, and capturing some of their business, primarily at major supercomputer companies like Cray, Convex and Amdahl. Vitesse focused on digital GaAs ICs and on building more complex LSI chips, rather than just faster ones. The company felt that more gates on a chip led to better manufacturability, lower power consumption and lower cost.
Then, in the early 1990s, as supercomputers collapsed, the company took a beating. But it wasn't fatal. "We had to remake ourselves," said Gardner.
Vitesse moved into the communications business -- the wired cellular infrastructure -- and into routers and switches. And it went after Fibre Channel disk drives and RAID storage systems.
The company's concentration on greater integration led to gate arrays with as many as 200,000 gates. Some of these chips go into automatic-test equipment at companies like Teradyne and Schlumberger. Gardner said those testers are almost like supercomputers.
Vitesse started as a gate-array ASIC company. It now does 90 percent of its product development and revenue in standard products, so its average gate count is declining. It still emphasizes digital communications, with gate speeds up to 10 Gbits/s. The company is the leader in chips for fiber-optic communications. |
