Tundra Semiconductor Corporation is a company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It is owned by Integrated Device Technology.
Tundra supplies communications, computing and storage companies with System Interconnect products, intellectual property (IP) and design services backed by customer service and technical support. Tundra's track record includes bridges and switches enabling industry standards: RapidIO, PCI, PCI-X, PCI Express, Power ISA, VME, HyperTransport, Interlaken, and SPI4.2. Tundra's products enable board design and layout, with specific focus on system level signal integrity. Tundra's design services division, Silicon Logic Engineering, Inc., offers ASIC and FPGA design services, semiconductor intellectual property and product development consulting.
Tundra has design centers in North America: Ottawa, Eau Claire, Wisconsin and in Hyderabad, India. Its sales offices are located in Europe, and throughout North America, and Asia Pacific.
In 2004, Tundra joined with IBM and others to form Power.org, an organization devoted to drive development and adaptation of Power ISA computers.
History
Although Tundra was incorporated as an entity in 1995, its history goes back to 1983 as Calmos Semiconductor, which was subsequently acquired in 1989 by Newbridge Networks Corporation, where it became known as Newbridge Microsystems and in 1995 was spun out as Tundra Semiconductor. In June 2009 Tundra was acquired by IDT.
Calmos
Former MicroSystems International and Mosaid employee John Roberts founded Calmos Microsystems in April 1983. The company was initially run out of his home in Kanata and moved to a facility on Edgewater Road in Kanata once the company had raised $800,000 in funds.
The company originally planned to design and produce gate array integrated circuits, or chips, for Canadian and U.S. customers. During the design phase, the market dried up and forced the company to focus on developing application-specific circuits. These application-specific circuits would later be incorporated into a larger circuits for other applications. It ended up being a profitable niche that saw the company through the early 1980s memory market slump.
By October 1985, Calmos had raised additional funds, bringing the total to $1.4 million, had grown to 15 employees and had yearly revenue of $1.5 Million. In order to increase sales and grow the business, John Roberts looked for a CEO with experience in the U.S. semiconductor market. Adam Chowaniec, who had left Commodore International's Semiconductor division was brought on board as President, while John Roberts became the Executive VP of R&D.
Newbridge Microsystems
Newbridge Networks primarily acquired Calmos Microsystems for its single chip high-speed public key data encryption system, which became a selling point for Newbridge Networks systems to the U.S. federal government. The rest of the original Calmos Product line though revenue generating and profitable was not a major reason for the acquisition, these products continued to be sources of revenue well after the division was spun out as Tundra, most notably this include the 8085 variant which was sold as late as 1999.
In December 1995, Newbridge Microsystems assets were sold to a new corporate entity known as Tundra Semiconductor.
Newbridge Affiliate
At the time of the Tundra spun out the company raised $10 Million (CDN) in third-party investment from Venture Capital Funds and Mutual funds, Terry Matthews also made a personal investment and Newbridge retained a 38% ownership in the new entity meaning Tundra Semiconductor became a member of the Newbridge affiliate program. A benefit of the spin out from direct Newbridge Networks ownership was that Tundra was now free to sell to Newbridge competitors
In 1997, Canadian Industry Minister John Manley announced that Tundra Semiconductor would receive a $400,000 loan for R&D use. Chowaniec stated to a Rideau Club luncheon that Tundra had $11 million in revenue in 1996 and expected to generate $20 million or $21 million in revenue achieve profitability in 1997 and hoped to increase sales revenues by another 50 per cent in 1998. He also made reference to the fact that the company was having difficulty in recruiting the talent it needed to move the company forward with about 20 positions for engineers that were unfilled. The company employee count during this period grew from 50 to 70.