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Customer Service
One of the biggest differentiations in Pericom’s
business model is its emphasis on customer service.
In talking about his role at the company, Joseph
Juan stated, “I frequently visit customers with
our regional sales team to reiterate how Pericom offers
a lot of diverse product lines to help them solve
various integrity issues.” The hands-on approach
that Pericom takes with its customers provides insight
into why their customers come back for more.
Paired with their comprehensive design resources
and online support, Pericom’s solutions make it
easy for designers to meet their
design requirements. Among the
various design resources are application
notes, design guidelines,
and simulation models that
you can run before you start the
PCB layout. “The customer can
provide us with all of their design
requirements,” Juan told us,
“From there, we can take connectors,
PCB layers, board materials
and parametric and plug
them into the simulation models.”
After developing the simulation
The hands-on approach
that Pericom
takes with
its customers
provides insight
into why their
customers come
back for more.
models, the team can run a SPICE simulation that
can show the customer where to place the repeater
products to get the optimal effect. The combination
of these services enables customers to design more
effectively and efficiently, which cuts the time from
design to market.
Signal Conditioning and the
Pericom Solution
Pericom has a variety of products to deal with the
signal conditioning of products covering high-speed
serial interfaces. As these interfaces migrate from
parallel to serial high-speed interfaces and the speed
goes above 5GB per second, the
problems with signal attenuation
and insertion loss arise, which
causes the system to have integrity
issues. That’s where Pericom
comes in. In order to overcome
some of the more difficult layout
issues, the application team at
Pericom uses a variety of tools.
“The tools we use in our lab consist
of pattern generators or highspeed
signal analyzers,” Juan
told us. “This is done in order to
re-produce a data pattern across
Actual Size of Pericom’s USB3.0 PIEQX501 ReDriver
the high-speed signal.” Juan also mentioned how the
team uses a high-speed scope that runs “upwards
of 20GB in order to measure all of these slopes and
rise/fall times.”
These requirements are reflected in Pericom’s
products. For signal conditioning products, Pericom
has a very-well defined USB3 ReDriver (repeater)
product that
has allowed them to
Pericom’s team
attends the complianceworkshop
regularly
to ensure that
their products
are fully compatibile
with
other devices.
successfully break
into the notebook
and server markets.
Apart from the USB3
ReDrivers is a line
of PCIe ReDrivers,
which is something
the company has
been seeing a lot of
demand to ensure
the desired SI level.
“Pericom makes the
effort to make sure
that all of the IC con-
troller products meet the compliancy testing,” Juan
told us. “We attend the compliance workshop on a
regular basis, which allows us to offer fully tested
and compatible devices that can be attached to other
host controllers.”
In hearing about the many ways that the Pericom
team shows commitment to creating a unique and
easy experience for the customer, it’s evident that the
Pericom solution is a pairing of quality devices and
superlative customer service. While this approach
should be a prerequisite business model for any
semiconductor company, based on Pericom’s fastgrowing
sales and stature, it seems to be the key to
their success. ■
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