Siae Microelettronica is an Italian multinational corporation and a global supplier of telecom network equipment. It provides wireless backhaul and fronthaul solutions that comprise microwave and millimeter wave radio systems, along with fiber optics transmission systems provided by its subsidiary SM Optics.
The company is headquartered in Milan, Italy, with 26 regional offices around the globe.
Corporate history
1952–1970s: Origins and initial growth
Edoardo Mascetti, after graduating in 1949 in Electrical Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Milan and working as electronic designer for Siemens, founded his company and named it SIAE, acronym for Società Italiana Apparecchiature Elettroniche The company manufactured measurement systems such as electro-mechanical testers, analog oscilloscopes, telephone system analyzers and signal generators.
A 431A-model oscilloscope by SIAE was also part of the synthesizer in the Studio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano (RAI) until its dismissal in 1983 and is currently on permanent display with the original study equipment at the Musical Instrument museum hosted at the Castello Sforzesco, Milan.
A few years after founding SIAE, Edoardo Mascetti co-founded in 1958 Microelettronica S.p.A., a company whose business was the design of telecommunication equipment for radio and landline systems and which was initially located in a basement in Milan. In 1963, the two complementary companies were merged into Siae Microelettronica S.p.A. and the headquarters was moved to the nearby town of Cologno Monzese, where a larger area was available to accommodate the new offices and manufacturing plant.
The new company counted less than 50 employees and focused its business on telecommunication systems, which were rising thanks to the capillary diffusion of telephone systems in Italy. Analog multiplexing systems for telephone providers constituted the company's principal product; nonetheless, in 1963, the company began an active collaboration with ENEL, an Italian provider of electric power, in order to create a supervision system for the national distribution network, whose successful outcome later fostered similar activities in northern Europe and specifically in Norway.
By the mid '60s, the company began growing due to its first large-scale commercialized radio transceiver: the 3-channel 3-B3 and later the RT450 (1966), capable of aggregating 48 channels into UHF band. The RT450 equipment was also certified by :it:Telettra under the commercial name H450 as a fallback link for its high-capacity solutions. Power-line communication systems were also manufactured by the company in those years along with the first fixed and mobile communication terminals in VHF band (1972) for vehicular communications (predating modern mobile phones) and anti burglar alarm systems.
By 1973, a new internal division was created for the design of television broadcasting equipment (repeaters and transmitters) whose main customer was the national television company RAI. The first television products were based on thermo-ionic tubes though the improvement of solid state technologies soon replaced vacuum tubes. Similar improvements in printed board manufacturing made microstrip circuits a viable solution for increasingly high microwave frequencies and in 1978 the RT12 radio equipment boasted the first direct-conversion 2.3 GHz synthesized modulator and could aggregate 120 telephone channels.
In these years, the company manufactured the historical link to connect the Milan and Rome branches of the Corriere della Sera newspaper.
The employees were about a hundred though the company still remained a family-run business led by the founder and a tight board of managers through the 1970s. Computer-aided design of electronic circuits was approached and exploited to improve yield and reduce the design time especially for the critical high-frequency sections.
1980s-2000s: Digital and worldwide company
The early '80s witnessed two intertwined aspects which boosted the activities: the digital revolution reached commercial radio links and the RT20 thus leveraged 4-QAM modulation in order to provide low-capacity links while the increased globalization opened up international markets and the company business expanded to Norway, Great Britain and gradually to Europe. A quality control system was soon implemented to meet and certify the improved production standards.