Oxford Semiconductor expands into US and Asia with new offices in California and Singapore

British silicon connectivity specialist, Oxford Semiconductor, has announced the opening of two new offices, one in the US and the other in Singapore, as part of the expansion of its global sales and technical support network.

James Lewis, one of the founding directors, has moved to California and established Oxford Semiconductor Inc. in Mission Viejo. The new company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Oxford Semiconductor Ltd. and Lewis is the company President with Ed Brown, also from the UK office, taking on the role of Technical Marketing Manager. Their first priority is to build a sales and support team of ten staff and to grow their representative and distribution channels.

The Singapore office is headed by William Wong who assumes the role of Area Sales Manager (Asia). Wong has 15 years of experience in the electronics industry, most recently as Regional Sales Manager for South East Asia with VLSI. He will be responsible for expanding Oxford Semiconductor's customer base in Asia, both through direct sales and indirect channels.

Oxford Semiconductor's export sales have quadrupled since 1999 and the US market will account for 40% of total sales of $10 million this year, up from 28% in 1999. The company is also enjoying strong sales growth in Asia.

Founded in 1992, Oxford Semiconductor designs and manufactures ASICs, high speed serial communications devices (UARTs), bridge chips for PCI to Local Bus/Parallel port applications, and devices to bridge from IDE to IEE 1394 (FireWire). In order to assist customers in minimising product development cycles, Oxford Semiconductor's design teams also undertake the design of evaluation boards, reference designs and enhanced device driver software. Oxford Semiconductor products are used by OEMs in mass storage drives, smart cables for PCs and Macs, serial cards for cellular phones and Bluetooth applications. The company is privately funded.