Vitesse Semiconductor

Swiftness and finesse come together in Vitesse Semiconductor's chips. Vitesse (French for "speed") is a leading supplier of high-speed integrated circuits; most of its chips are made with CMOS silicon processes. The company also develops silicon germanium (SiGe) compound semiconductors, which are much harder to work with than ordinary silicon (and thus more expensive), but the fancier chips are much faster (electrons travel through the advanced compounds more swiftly) and consume less energy than silicon-based chips of equal size. Vitesse's chips are primarily used in communications gear, particularly in networking equipment. The company gets nearly 40% of its sales in the Asia/Pacific region.