PMC-Sierra – The importance of innovation, adaptability and resilience

Okay, well, let's start with a bit of background.

Now, all three of you did either electrical engineering or engineering physics at UBC here locally in Vancouver, had some overlap in other key anchor tech companies in the 90s or 80s, 90s before PMC, including Mitel, NPR Teletech, and Mycotel.

And PMC, in fact, was essentially spun out of Mycotel.

Maybe you can each give me a bit of the background on the founding of PMC Sierra and a bit about the founding and also your vision.

Well, I can start.

Basically, I was hired back in 86 by NPR to spin their chip group out of NPR.

They had a fairly large group and they basically ran out of things for them to do and they didn't want to fire them all.

So they wanted me to try to figure out a way to spin them out.

It took many, many years, five or six years.

I hired guys like Colin and Kevin and got the thing going later on about 88 or 89 and started doing designs for people.

What we tried to do at the very beginning, I sent out a note to the entire group at NPR, like 200 or 300 engineers.

I sent out a note asking them if they had IP that I could put into chips and guys like Colin and I knew how to make chips and we would get this IP out into the industry and sell chips with their IP in it instead of them doing consulting work, trying to make dollars per hour.

Kevin was the only guy in the whole company that sent me anything back.

And he sent me a long two or three page story about the Sonnet technology that's now becoming important and that we could put Sonnet technology in these chips and sell them to all the telecom companies out there.

And so we hired, Kevin was at that point in another group and we got him into PMC and he became the first kind of systems guy that was in the company to help us drive our mission.

You want to talk about that, Kevin? Do you remember that letter and how you came in? Oh,

yeah.

I remember that the first night I didn't write up anything because I wanted to watch Mork and Mindy.

But then the next night I decided to write something up.

I submitted it.

And I didn't know that I was the only one that had submitted anything until about six years later when you told me.

But yeah, in terms of my background, I was there at MPR, although most of my work after graduation, I worked at Bell Northern Research in Ottawa and then later in Edmonton.

And then I came back to MPR where Greg and Colin and many of the other people were ex-Mytel people.

And Greg, I think you missed one step.

I heard that you were hired to come to NPR to do a big project to do a bunch of chips in-house.