Weighing in with $12.1 billion in market capital, AMCC (Applied Micro Circuits Corp.) produces sophisticated integrated circuits for the rapidly growing communications industry. Among its customers are Alcatel, Cisco Systems, Lucent Technologies, Nokia, Nortel Networks, Siemens and 3Com.

"The past few years have been an incredibly exciting period of change for AMCC and the markets we serve," says David M. Rickey, president and CEO of AMCC. "For the first time, the IC (integrated circuit) industry is no longer being driven by the PC, but by communications. The winners in this explosive market will be those IC companies that can deliver end-to-end communications solutions that are reliable, enable high performance and bandwidth and are available now. AMCC is one of these companies."

AMCC was founded in 1979 and went public Nov. 25, 1997, with an opening share price of $19.38. After a two-for-one stock split last September, stocks were trading at $224.17 a share as of Feb. 22. The company was added to the Nasdaq 100 last December. Rickey played a key role in its current boom period. He came to AMCC with a strong academic and professional background. He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Marietta College, another in Metallurgy and Materials Science from Columbia University and a master's degree in Material Science and Engineering from Stanford. He was an engineer at IBM before moving to Northern Telecom for eight years. Rickey went to work for AMCC as vice president of operations in 1993. Two years later, he took a similar position with NexGen. In 1996, the AMCC board brought Rickey back to AMCC, this time to head the company. Rickey immediately began to implement his strategic vision of refocusing the company’s effort toward the then-emerging communications industry.

AMCC acquired Ten Mountains Design, a Minneapolis company, in April 1998, and a Massachusetts company, Cimaron Communications, last March. The company employs 442 people worldwide and operates sales offices covering the United States, Europe, Israel, Asia and Pacific Rim companies.

Its revenues for the first nine months of fiscal 2000, were $115.3 million, up 51 percent from the $76.3 million in revenues for the same period the previous year. The company’s income rose 103 percent, from $13.8 million in fiscal 1999 to $28 million in the three quarters that ended Dec. 31.

AMCC is headquartered in a 90,000-square-foot facility in San Diego, where it also operates a 20,771-square-foot wafer fabrication plant. In January, AMCC broke ground on Sorrento Mesa for a 62,000-square-foot engineering building.

— Lynne Carrier