Tekmos History; Planned & Providence

I have been wanting to put together a history timeline of Tekmos and share the unique and sometimes unfortunate natural disasters that have helped shape and grow our company to produce custom integrated circuits, solutions ranging from high volume cost reductions for existing applications, drop in replacements for obsolete parts, and creating entirely new products. Our markets have also expanded as we have evolved with planning and fate, opening doors to Consumer Electronics, Aerospace, Military, Industrial, and Medical. We have become leaders in the industry of custom analog and mixed-signal Integrated Circuit (IC) solutions with over 900 designs.

1997 – Founded

Tekmos was founded as a spin-off of Flextronics Semiconductor. We started off as a pure design center, doing contract design on a number of projects. The designs ranged from small FPGA conversions for ASIC providers to large FPGA-based systems for on-demand cable companies.

1999 – First Proprietary Chip

We heard of a case where Motorola needed a replacement of a part they had once made in order to satisfy one of their major companies. The part was a 68HC24 Port Replacement Unit. We offered to make it for Motorola, and they accepted. As part of the deal, they agreed to forward inquiries for this part to us. Overnight, we acquired several hundred small customers, and a part with a collective volume of over 100K per year. This changed our thinking, and we switched from being an independent design center into a fabless semiconductor company.

2000 – The Dot-Com Crash and Lucent

The dot-com crash started in 1999 and lasted for several years. The contract design market collapsed, which made us glad we had switched to selling chips. At the same time, the semiconductor division of ATT was spun off as Agere. In a cost cutting move, Agere end-of-life’ed most of the chips used by Lucent in the telephone switches. Many ASICs were put out to bid, and Tekmos was successful in winning many of them. This started our involvement in the Telecom industry. We also were able to recreate several obsolete chips that became standard products. One of these was the TK17LV040 serial memory. This was our first stacked die product, which we have since used in many different products.

2005 – Katrina

Katrina struck Louisiana in August of 2005. Katrina destroyed a number of local exchanges in New Orleans. These centers used a custom chip that consolidated a number of phone lines into a 40 MHz link to the main office. Tekmos started a rush program to recreate the chip and provide the 60K units necessary to restore phone service to New Orleans. This was our first rush order, and we developed capabilities that we continue to use today.

Next month I will fill in the blanks with more stories and history about Tekmos.