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Agilent consolidates electronics production

Aglilent is to relocate its electronics production from its Newark and Santa Clara fabs to Fort Collins.
Agilent is to transfer its electronics manufacturing from two of its Californian fabrication plants to its Fort Collins plant in Colorado.

According to Mark Alden, worldwide press manager for the Semiconductor Products Group, Agilent will move the production of GaAs diode and transistor devices as well as film bulk acoustic resonator (FBAR) MEMS filters from its Newark fab to Fort Collins. PHEMT PA manufacturing will be transferred from Santa Clara to Fort Collins.

"After these transfers are complete, the Newark and Santa Clara fabs will be shut down, and we expect this to happen by the end of 2002," Alden told Compound Semiconductor.

Alden added that the fab relocations will cause 200 job losses in Newark and 130 in Santa Clara. These redundancies are part of the 8000 job cuts that were announced by Agilent in 2001.

The Fort Collins facility manufactures CMOS image sensors, optical navigation ICs and high-speed bipolar devices. However, Alden points out that the plant has already installed 6 inch GaAs wafer-fabrication lines that can take on the new GaAs demand. Agilent announced plans in October 2000 to build these fabrication lines.

Alden also says that Agilent has no current plans to shift its laser and LED fab activities to Fort Collins. Multimode VCSELs, LEDs and singlemode lasers will continue to be made at their respective plants in San Jose, CA, Singapore and the UK.

As well as consolidating its electronics business Agilent is working on an InP process. "We are developing our InP process in our Santa Rosa facility," Alden said. "Initial applications will be demanding test and measurement products, including test equipment for 40 Gbit/s communications systems."

SiGe still has its place

According to Alden, Agilent still has plans to use SiGe technologies despite its InP development activities. "SiGe technology cannot compete with advanced InP bipolar transistors. For communication applications above 40 Gbit/s, InP will be required," he said. "But for lower-speed applications SiGe remains an attractive option and we have several SiGe suppliers that satisfy our requirements."

Alden adds that Agilent s merchant wireless semiconductor division is investigating a number of technologies for wireless devices and is currently using E-mode PHEMT technology to manufacture PAs for CDMA and GSM handsets. "[E-PHEMTs] are more power-efficient than HBTs," said Alden. "But we are also working on double-heterostructure HBTs with a GaAsSb base."

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