Actel Acquires Pigeon Point Systems

(Business News & Technology News, 5 Aug 2008)

Actel Corp. recently has acquired Pigeon Point Systems, a privately-held supplier of telecommunications computing architecture (TCA) management components. Actel now offers a comprehensive solution for proprietary and standards-based system management implementations in the industrial, military, telecommunications, and medical markets.

Defined by the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG), the industry-standard TCA specifications cover the AdvancedTCA, Advanced Mezzanine Card (AdvancedMC) and the MicroTCA frameworks. According to industry estimates from market research firm VDC, the opportunity for the overall standards-based TCA system market is expected to be roughly $1.8 billion by 2009.

Earlier this year, Actel and Pigeon Point announced a partnership to develop and market solutions based on the Actel Fusion mixed-signal FPGAs to speed the design of AdvancedTCA blade and AdvancedMC carrier blade management controllers. The two companies' combined portfolio of reference designs, development kits, easy-to-use development environments and expert design services gives designers the capability to address system and power management issues throughout the design process.

"Pigeon Point is the de facto standard in the TCA arena," says John East, President and CEO of Actel. "As TCA experiences rapid deployment across the increasingly power-sensitive telecommunications, military and industrial markets, the merger of their market and technology leadership with Actel's innovative power and system management solutions gives us a tremendous opportunity to capture a significant portion of the TCA system market."

"Through mutual customer engagements, we've seen how the Actel Fusion FPGA offers TCA designers compelling benefits in implementing the critical system functions that affect TCA system and power management," says Mark Overgaard, President of Pigeon Point. "Actel's innovative mixed-signal Fusion FPGA, together with Pigeon Point's firmware and reference designs, will serve the complete range of customer applications—from simple system management to higher performance TCA applications."

Pigeon Point Systems has more than 140 customers around the world, including many of the top global communications OEMs. Their product portfolio consists of management components for modular platforms based on the AdvancedTCA, AdvancedMC and MicroTCA architectures. In addition to extending this portfolio with products based on the Actel Fusion mixed-signal FPGAs, Pigeon Point will continue to offer and enhance its existing market-leading solutions. The company will be a wholly owned subsidiary of Actel and will continue to operate out of its Scotts Valley, Calif. headquarters.

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