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Quantum Effect Devices was a company originally named Quantum Effect Design, incorporated in 1991. The three founders, Tom Riordan, Earl Killian and Ray Kunita were senior managers at MIPS Computer Systems Inc.. They left MIPS at a time when the company was having a difficult time selling entire computer systems instead of concentrating on building microprocessor chips which was MIPS' original mission. Soon after, SGI purchased MIPS. QED was started as a microprocessor design house. IDT was a major funder and customer for the initial QED design. The original product plan for QED was to build a MIPS microprocessor for a laptop computer. This was during the ACE initiative from Microsoft to support multiple RISC architectures for their new NT operating system. While that market never materialized, the first product, the R4600 microprocessor, proved to be successful in several embedded markets such as networking routers and arcade games.
Subsequent projects were designed for companies such as NEC, Toshiba, NKK and SGI.
Several years later, in an attempt to increase product revenue, the company transformed itself to a product company selling its own line of MIPS microprocessors. At that time, the company changed its' name to Quantum Effect Devices. After successful products like the RM5200 and the RM7000, the company went IPO on February 01, 2000. The company was acquired by PMC-Sierra on October 2000 and became the Microprocessor Products Division of PMC.
The company name is attributed to Tom Riordan. He believed that the company would survive to the age when semiconductor geometry dimensions would become so small that quantum effects would dominant the circuit behaviors.
