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This Form 10-K contains certain forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, including statements regarding our strategy and future financial performance and those statements identified under "Item 7 – Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations – Note Regarding Forward-looking Statements.” Our actual results could differ materially from the results described in these forward-looking statements as a result of certain factors including those set forth under “Item 1A – Risk Factors,” beginning below at page 10, and elsewhere in this Form 10-K. Although we believe that the matters reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, we cannot guarantee future results, levels of activit
y, performance or achievements. You should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. We disclaim any obligation to update information contained in any forward-looking statement.
We develop and manufacture specialized semiconductor products used by our customers for a wide variety of embedded control applications. Our product portfolio comprises 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit PIC® microcontrollers and 16-bit dsPIC® digital signal controllers, which feature on-board Flash (reprogrammable) memory technology. In addition, we offer a broad spectrum of high-performance linear, mixed-signal, power management, thermal management, safety and security, and interface devices. We also make serial EEPROMs. Our synergistic product portfolio targets thousands of applications and a growing demand for high-performance designs
in the automotive, communications, computing, consumer and industrial control markets. Our quality systems are ISO/TS16949 (2002 version) certified.
Microchip Technology Incorporated was incorporated in Delaware in 1989. In this Form 10-K, “we,” “us,” and “our” each refers to Microchip Technology Incorporated and its subsidiaries. Our executive offices are located at 2355 West Chandler Boulevard, Chandler, Arizona 85224-6199 and our telephone number is (480) 792-7200.
Our Internet address is www.microchip.com. We post the following filings on our website as soon as reasonably practicable after they are electronically filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission:
·
our annual report on Form 10-K
our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q
our current reports on Form 8-K
our proxy statement
any amendments to the above-listed reports filed or furnished pursuant to Sections 13(a) or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934
All SEC filings on our website are available free of charge. The information on our website is not incorporated into this Form 10-K.
Industry Background
Competitive pressures require manufacturers of a wide variety of products to expand product functionality and provide differentiation while maintaining or reducing cost. To address these requirements, manufacturers often use integrated circuit-based embedded control systems that enable them to:
differentiate their products
replace less efficient electromechanical control devices
reduce the number of components in their system
add product functionality
reduce the system level energy consumption
decrease time to market for their products
significantly reduce product cost
Embedded control systems have been incorporated into thousands of products and subassemblies in a wide variety of applications and markets worldwide, including:
automotive comfort, safety and entertainment applications
remote control devices
handheld tools
home appliances
portable computers
robotics
accessories
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cordless and cellular telephones
motor controls
security systems
educational and entertainment devices
consumer electronics
power supplies
touch screens
medical products
Embedded control systems typically incorporate a microcontroller as the principal active, and sometimes sole, component. A microcontroller is a self-contained computer-on-a-chip consisting of a central processing unit, non-volatile program memory, random access memory for data storage and various input/output peripheral capabilities. In addition to the microcontroller, a complete embedded control system incorporates application-specific software and may include specialized peripheral device controllers, non-volatile memory components such as EEPROMs, and various analog and interface products.
The increasing demand for embedded control has made the market for microcontrollers one of the larger segments of the semiconductor market at approximately $10.7 billion in calendar year 2009. Microcontrollers are currently available in 4-bit through 32-bit architectures. 4-bit microcontrollers are the smallest segment of the microcontroller market and have been in decline for several years. 8-bit microcontrollers remain very cost-effective for a wide range of high-volume embedded control applications and, as a result, continue to represent the largest portion of the overall microcontroller market. 16-bit and 32-bit microcontrollers provide higher performance and functionality, and are generally found in more complex embedded control applications.
Our Products
Our strategic focus is on embedded control solutions, including:
microcontrollers
development tools
analog and interface products
memory products
We provide highly cost-effective embedded control solutions that also offer the advantages of small size, high performance, extreme low power, low voltage operation and ease of development, enabling timely and cost-effective embedded control product integration by our customers.
We offer a broad family of microcontroller products featuring our unique, proprietary architecture marketed under the PIC brand name. We believe that our PIC product family is a price/performance leader in the worldwide microcontroller market. We have shipped over 8 billion PIC microcontrollers to customers worldwide since their introduction in 1990. Our PIC products are designed for applications requiring field programmability, high performance, low power and cost effectiveness. They feature a variety of memory technology configurations, low voltage, extreme low power, small footprint and ease of use. Our performance results from a product architecture which features dual data and instruction pathways, referred to as a Harvard dual-bus architecture; a Reduced Instruction Set Compute
r, referred to as RISC; and variable length instructions; all of which provide significant speed advantages over alternative single-bus, Complex Instruction Set Computer architectures, referred to as CISC. With over 650 microcontrollers in our product portfolio, we target the 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit microcontroller markets.
Digital Signal Controllers (DSC) are a subset of our 16-bit microcontroller offering. Our dsPIC DSC families integrate the control features of high-performance 16-bit microcontrollers with the computation capabilities of Digital Signal Processors (DSPs), along with a wide variety of peripheral functions making them suitable for a large number of embedded control applications. Our dsPIC product family offers a broad suite of hardware and software development tools, software application libraries, development boards and reference designs to ease and expedite the customer application development cycle. With its field-reprogrammability, large selection of peripheral functions, small footprint and ease of use, we believe that our dsPIC DSCs expand ou
r addressable market.
We have used our manufacturing experience and design and process technology to bring additional enhancements and manufacturing efficiencies to the development and production of our PIC family of microcontroller products. Our extensive experience base has enabled us to develop our advanced, low-cost user programmability feature by incorporating non-volatile memory, such as Flash, EEPROM and EPROM Memory, into the microcontroller, and to be a leader in reprogrammable microcontroller product offerings.
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Development Tools
We offer a comprehensive set of low-cost and easy-to-learn application development tools. These tools enable system designers to quickly and easily program a PIC microcontroller and dsPIC DSC for specific applications and, we believe, are a key factor for obtaining design wins.
Our family of development tools for PIC and dsPIC devices operates in the standard Windows® environment on standard PC hardware. These tools range from entry-level systems, which include an assembler and programmer or in-circuit debugging hardware, to fully configured systems that provide in-circuit emulation hardware. Customers moving from entry-level designs to those requiring real-time emulation are able to preserve their investment in learning and tools as they migrate to future PIC devices since all of our PIC and dsPIC development tools share the same integrated development environment.
Many independent companies also develop and market application development tools that support our standard microcontroller product architecture. Currently, there are approximately 200 third-party tool suppliers worldwide whose products support our proprietary microcontroller architecture.
We believe that familiarity with and adoption of both our and third-party development tools by an increasing number of product designers will be an important factor in the future selection of our embedded control products. These development tools allow design engineers to develop thousands of application-specific products from our standard microcontrollers. To date, we have shipped more than 900,000 development tools.