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Agilent to close UK fiber-optic component plant

Agilent is closing its fiber-optic component fab in the UK, meaning that almost all of the company's optoelectronic devices will now be fabricated in Singapore.
Agilent is to close its fiber-optic component manufacturing plant in Ipswich, UK with the loss of 200 jobs. Production of DFB lasers and photodetectors is to be switched from the Ipswich site to a new Agilent facility in Singapore, opened earlier this year.

Around 50 Agilent employees – mostly R&D and marketing staff – will be retained in Ipswich, but will be relocated to a smaller facility. The component fab will shut down by the end of July.

Hewlett-Packard, from which Agilent was spun out in 1999, acquired the Ipswich components operation in 1993 from BT&D Technologies. This company was established as a joint venture between British Telecom and DuPont to develop optoelectronic technologies.

HP and Agilent invested more than $150 million in the Ipswich facility. This included an 80,000 square foot building built to house growing numbers of staff, which was completed in early 2002 at a cost of $20 million. However, staffing levels peaked at around 1100 in 2001 and have been falling ever since.

Agilent will now transfer the epitaxy and wafer processing activities for DFB lasers and photodetectors to its new $92 million facility in Yishun, Singapore, which was opened in February 2003. Some of the back-end processing activities for photodetector products had already been transferred to Singapore.

The vast majority of Agilent s optoelectronic devices, including optocouplers, standard-brightness LEDs, and emitters for IR transceivers, are already being fabricated in Singapore.

Lumileds Lighting, the joint venture between Agilent and Philips Lighting, continues to manufacture high-brightness nitride and AlGaInP LEDs in San Jose, CA.

Agilent has also transferred its entire VCSEL component manufacturing business from California to Singapore. This means that, with the exception of Lumileds, Agilent has moved all optoelectronic device manufacturing out of the US.

For the present time, it appears that Agilent will continue to operate its R&D facility in Turin, Italy, acquired from Telecom Italia in early 2000. The 40,000 square-foot facility contains a clean room for epitaxy and processing, as well as characterization and packaging laboratories.

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