Semiconductor companies in Colorado

A California semiconductor company that bought a Colorado Springs-based design center in February plans to double the operation’s 22-person staff during the next three years, a company official said Friday.

PMC-Sierra Inc. has hired four or five engineers for the design operation it acquired from Maxim Integrated Products Inc., and plans to expand its staff by about 30 percent a year, said Salman Ghufran, vice president of product development for PMC-Sierra’s Enterprise Storage Division.

The operation moved last month into a 15, 600-square-foot design center at 5755 Mark Dabling Blvd. that could accommodate up to 56 employees. PMC-Sierra will formally open the center Wednesday with a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

“Given the talent of both experienced and entry-level engineers available in Colorado Springs, we wanted to give that center the ability to grow, ” Ghufran said. “The area has a long history in data storage, so it was very attractive for us to acquire this operation and build this center.”

The Springs center will give the company is first design operation in the central U.S.; it also operates design centers in Vancouver, British Columbia; Roseville and Sunnyvale, Calif.; and Allentown, Pa., as well as China, Germany and India.

The Springs operation designs semiconductors and software used by chips that transmit data to hundreds of servers and other devices that store large amounts of digital information, typically in corporate data centers. PMC-Sierra paid $15.9 million for the operation, according to documents it filed this year with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Maxim paid $63 million to Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. for the operation in 2007.

“There were a lot of synergies between the product lines of the two companies and it was the consensus of both to go in this direction. One of the most intriguing things about this transaction was the deep knowledge of the (operation’s) team of this business and technology, ” Ghufran said.

The design operation had shared office space along Centennial Boulevard with multimedia, system-sensing and interconnection products and test operations that Maxim retained before PMC-Sierra leased space in the Mark Dabling Boulevard location this year.