In 1995, using ideas from UBC Electrical Engineering students, PMC revolutionized the optical networking chipset market with the first OC-12 (622 Mbit/s) S/UNI transceiver chips.

This circuit-design breakthrough put the company 3 years ahead of Bell Labs in its optical transceiver development.

[15] In May 2006, PMC-Sierra acquired Passave, Inc., a developer of system-on-chip semiconductors for the fiber to the home access market in a stock-for-stock transaction valued at approximately $300 million.

As a fabless semiconductor company, PMC-Sierra designed and tested products, with wafer fabrication and assembly outsourced functions to third party suppliers.

PMC-Sierra's customers included HP, EMC Corporation, Huawei, Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, ZTE and Juniper.

In July 2013 PMC completed the acquisition of IDT's Flash controller business[24] and in August 2014 introduced the Flashtec line of non-volatile memory drives.

[25] PMC-Sierra sold products for what is known as Ethernet in the first mile, which generally uses a passive optical network to residential areas.

The company's UniTRX chipsets were highly integrated, low-power RFICs for wideband radio modules that operated in the 400 MHz to 4 GHz frequency range.

These solutions addressed the performance requirements of 3GPP and 3GPP2 macro base station radio transceivers with support of multiple standards such as MC-GSM, cdma2000®, WCDMA, and LTE.