[Updated 8/7/12 5:30 pm, with Peregrine pricing shares.] It’s been a long time coming, but San Diego’s Peregrine Semiconductor raised $77 million in its IPO, offering 5.5 million shares at $14, according to Renaissance Capital’s IPO website. That’s at the low end of its planned range of $14 to $16. Trading is set to begin tomorrow on the NASDAQ market under the ticker symbol PSMI.
The company has spent 22 years getting to this point. Peregrine began with an unusual approach, using synthetic sapphire as a semiconductor material in its proprietary ultraCMOS (Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor) design for radio frequency chips. It took time to master the technique. Others that tried silicon on sapphire encountered high defect rates, making the technology more suitable for aerospace and defense projects, where performance and other factors can be more important than cost.
As a result, Peregrine’s market was mostly limited during its first decade to satellite makers and military programs.
The company moved to expand beyond that market in 2001, eventually designing chips for cell phone antenna switches, digital attenuators, mixers, and other commercial radio devices. But it is not a high-dollar market. Prices for cell phone switching chips, for example, run less than 20 cents apiece. Peregrine says it has shipped more than 1 billion radio frequency chips since 2006.
Yet Peregrine persevered, working to
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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