picoChip today announced the appointment of Tom McQuade as the company’s VP of North American Sales. Tom will be responsible for the development of picoChip’s business activities in North America and to drive market penetration for the company’s fast growing WiMAX basestation solutions. He will report directly to John Graham, VP Worldwide Sales at picoChip.

Tom McQuade joins picoChip with experience of both successful start-ups and big companies. He has an established track record in the telecommunications industry where he has driven sales from zero to a 20 million dollar run-rate and built an extensive customer base with key customers in North America.

Tom’s appointment further strengthens picoChip’s highly experienced management team. Tom brings to picoChip over 20 years sales and management experience in the semiconductor industry in the US and other global territories. He joins picoChip from Globespan where he was Director Strategic Accounts and responsible for sales in California. Prior to Globespan Tom was VP Worldwide Sales at T.square, a successful start-up that was acquired by Globespan. He also held senior sales positions at Brooktree and Toshiba America, Inc.

picoChip provides solutions to the key challenges of cost, development time and flexibility for next generation of wireless systems. The company’s latest, second generation processor, the PC102 picoArrayTM, delivers world-beating price / performance for reconfigurable wireless signal processing and has achieved design wins with major companies developing wireless infrastructure. Uniquely, the company also delivers complete, standard compliant reference designs for UMTS (including HSDPA) and WiMAX.