Don,
PMCS's OC-48 products are in standard CMOS (silicon), while AMCC's are in more exotic (and expensive) GaAs, or SiGe. PMCS is the first company to be able to reach OC-48 speeds in strictly silicon. Their prices for wafers, testing, and the products themselves are lower because of it, which opens a much larger market of products.
As an analogy, using exotic materials and fuels, in Formula One they produce an 3 liter racing engine that produces incredible horsepower ratings. This is useful for a market that will pay for those materials and fuels, but it's not an engine that you'd see in the family grand touring sedan. To carry the analogy further, say Honda/Toyota/GM/Ford produced an aluminum engine, burning the gasoline you can get at the corner gas station that pumps out a similar amount of horsepower within a year or two of the development of that exotic F1 engine, and you have one hell of a family sedan available to the masses.
Now, I know it's far from a perfect analogy, but it does give you an idea of the difference in the products at the same speed (2.5Mbps). PMCS products generally have 4-8 year life cycles with significant revenue streams coming on 18-36 months after initial product introduction. PMCS said in the previous CC that they's have OC-192 product in CMOS (probably 0.15u or 0.13u) in 1H of 2001. So, you have to understand the products and markets for them, instead of trying to compare OC-48 to OC-48 on an apples to apples comparison between the companies.
-John |
