PMC Moves to Establish Category Leadership with Flash Controller Acquisition

IDT���s Enterprise Flash Controller Business accelerates PMC’s entrance into the rapidly growing enterprise solid-state drive market with leading-edge PCIe flash controllers, including the world’s first NVM Express flash controller. PMC believes that it will be able to improve its time-to-market by approximately two years due to the early product leadership and a robust design win pipeline, including wins spanning tier one datacenter, original equipment manufacturer and SSD customers.



According to International Data Corporation, the enterprise SSD market segment is expected to comprise half of the total SSD market in sales, reaching approximately $7 billion in 2016. PMC estimates that the combined PCIe and SAS controller total available market for these enterprise SSDs will quadruple and reach in excess of $500 million in 2016.



“Flash-based storage is causing a major disruption in enterprise storage due to the dramatic performance advantages of solid-state drives,” said Greg Lang, president and chief executive officer of PMC. “IDT’s PCIe controllers are particularly well suited for server-based SSDs targeted at cloud data center customers. The acquisition of IDT’s Enterprise Flash Controller Business is a strong complement to our current enterprise 12Gb/s SAS SSD controller product offering.”



As part of the transaction, PMC will acquire IDT’s Enterprise Flash Controller Business, including all related intellectual property, certain PCIe Switch technology and 75 patents overall. The Company expects to make employment offers to approximately 50 employees.



IDT has played a leading role in the standards efforts focused on broadening the adoption of PCIe SSDs. IDT is a founding member of the NVM Express Work Group, the industry organization formed a few years ago to standardize the software interface of enterprise and client SSDs. IDT is a member of the NVMe promoter group, which is directing the standard’s evolution, featuring companies such as Dell, Intel, EMC, NetApp, Oracle and Cisco. The IDT team is a leader in driving the controller product development in parallel with their standards work and their early product focus has enabled them to deliver the world’s first NVMe controllers.



“Dell is an active proponent of driving industry standards and has worked closely with the industry to establish standard-based PCIe SSD options to accelerate server application performance,” said Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager, Dell Server Solutions. “We are pleased to see the combination of these talented teams and look forward to continuing our collaboration with PMC and within the NVMe consortium in the future.”



The board of directors of PMC and the board of IDT have approved the transaction. It is expected to close in the third quarter of 2013, subject to certain regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions specified in the definitive agreement.