never before seen in the semiconductor industry, combined to design and produce a full 10 bit D/A converter on a single chip, the monoDac02. At that point PMI's linear process uniformity and products capitalizing on that uniformity put PMI in a class by itself. It would be several years before any other company could match the Dac-02. Bresee's superior processes, and George Erdi's outstanding design expertise enabled PMI to establish itself as a superior source of linear amplifiers, including operational amplifiers, some of which garnered U.S. patents. By superior layout and circuit design made possible by Bresee's and Khadders superior process uniformity, transistor performance, and surface passivation, Erdi was able to design and achieve breakthrough advances in micro-power amplifiers with both low input offset and 1/f noise voltage, rivaling many chopper amplifiers formerly used exclusively for microvolt input amplifiers. An industry milestone was the OP07, which was the first internally compensated, three-stage operational amplifier. It pioneered active base current cancellation and offset trimming, using Erdi's patented Zener-zapping technique. Erdi and other PMI engineers later expanded their efforts to include high-precision voltage references and additional mixed-signal semiconductors for data acquisition, data conversion, and telecommunications. PMI also bought Solid State Micro Technology. Erdi and Khadder left PMI in 1981 to co-found Linear Technology. PMI was founded with financing from Bourns, Inc., which held 70% of the shares and 30% was stock purchased at a nominal price by the founders. Ultimately, all shares were purchased by Bourns to make PMI a wholly owned subsidiary, PMI was finally bought by Analog Devices in August 1990. Many of PMI's converters, amplifiers, voltage references, and other linear ICs (including the REF0x and OP0x series) continue to be manufactured and marketed by Analog Devices, which currently maintain the largest share of the precision linear market (ADI sales = $2.5B, Maxim = $2.1B, Linear Technology = $1.1B). See also Analog Devices References Defunct semiconductor companies of the United States Fabless semiconductor companies Companies based in Santa Clara, California Companies disestablished in 1990 1990 disestablishments in California Defunct companies based in California