Back then, the vision of managing director and founder Wolfgang Seel was to accompany PROFIBUS as fieldbus technology with worldwide unprecedented acceptance and innovative products. Together with his employees he accepted this challenge and looking back, they have even exceeded this target. On the basis of the PROFIBUS-DP specifications profichip developed an alternative to the PROFIBUS ASIC's which had been on the market at that time and poured it in silicon. Every company that has ever developed an ASIC can clearly understand the involved challenges.
Within its first year profichip managed to place its PROFIBUS Slave Controller VPC3+ on the market followed by the PROFIBUS Lean Slave Controller VPCLS one year later. The range of products has continuously been advanced and in the year of the anniversary profichip will already introduce the fifth version of this chip - the VPC3+S.
Independent and flexible
Within the past 10 years the company always remained true to its slogan "independent and flexible". As a "Second Source" provider within the semi conductor segment profichip managed to increase the acceptance of this technology considerably and thanks to their PROFIBUS ASIC's to create a technologically leading product with an additional value for the end user. Of course, profichip owes this success to the trust and the partnership with its customers all around the globe as well as to the international marketing activities of PNO. It is them who will let profichip continue their way to success beyond the coming 10 years.
Right in time for the 10th anniversary the latest innovation of the company will go into production: the worldwide first single chip PLC for Step®7 based on the SPEED7 technology which was introduced in the year 2003. As one of the few companies in Germany, profichip developed and produced 130nm semi conductor technology with a complexity of approximately 36 million transistor cells (for comparison: an Intel Atom Micro Processor is available with 47 million transistor cells).
profichip GmbH expects a positive future as the technological leader of "automation in silicon" and is looking forward to celebrating its 10th anniversary together with PNO in spring 2009.