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Agere competitors recruiting here: Broadcom to open office in Allentown; Marvell to hold job fair.
(Morning Call, The (Allentown, PA) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Apr. 18--A major chip company that is a competitor to Agere Systems will open a small engineering office in the Allentown area, and has already begun to recruit people.
A second Agere competitor also has plans to open an office here and will hold a job fair in Allentown next month. Interest from the two companies comes on the heels of another round of layoffs at Agere, announced last week.
Broadcom of Irvine, Calif., will hire seven to eight engineers to work specifically to develop semiconductor chips for storage, or hard-disk drives -- Agere's largest product area.
The second company, Marvell of Santa Clara, Calif., may hire as many as 40 people if it opens an office in the Allentown area. The company, which unseated Agere as the No. 1 maker of chips for hard-drives in 2004, would also develop storage chips if it were to come here.
While it has not committed yet to an office, Marvell has already received 100 resumes, and plans to hold an open house for job candidates at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Allentown on May 11, recruiter Jason Fotenos said.
"Agere is a really good target, and Agere, given they have not been doing that well lately, they have a lot of people wanting to come aboard here and not a lot of people who want to relocate across the country," said Fotenos, in an interview Monday.
Broadcom has been interested in becoming more of a player in the growing storage chip sector for a while, experts say. With the Allentown team, the company will develop an in-demand type of hard-disk drive chip called a system-on-a-chip that integrates several elements.
While Marvell is still weighing its decision, Broadcom plans to hire the new employees in the next month. The company is moving quickly to take advantage of the recent layoffs at Agere that targeted engineers who worked on chips for hard-disk drives, said Chris Shols, a Broadcom recruiter. Broadcom plans to hold interviews in the Lehigh Valley in the coming weeks.
"There are key people there that are involved in a layoff situation so we want to move quickly," Shols said Monday of Agere.
Agere of Hanover Township, Lehigh County, notified state officials last week that it would be laying off 100 employees. The company declined to provide any details about the layoffs but employees and Broadcom and Marvell officials said about half of the people affected worked in storage.
The interest from Broadcom and Marvell is unusual because the Lehigh Valley has lost a lot of its engineering talent since the Internet bubble burst. Agere slashed its local payroll, and many small tech companies closed or merged with others. While smaller companies such as CyOptics, an Upper Macungie optical chipmaker, have absorbed some employees laid off by Agere, no internationally known companies have opened offices here.
Agere spun off from Lucent Technologies in 2001. In its early days as an independent company, it employed about 9,000 at three plants in the wider Lehigh Valley region, and 18,000 people worldwide. It now employs about 1,800 people locally, and 6,500 people worldwide, and has no local manufacturing plants. The company has not had a profitable year yet, and reported a 12 percent drop in annual revenue last year to $1.68 billion.
Agere officials have said pointedly most of the company's future hiring will take place outside of Allentown in areas such as Asia and the West Coast of the United States. Last year, it opened its second chip design center in Bangalore, India, and expanded an existing office in Longmont, Colo. that focuses on storage chip design.
Both Broadcom and Marvell officials acknowledged it might seem unusual to open a chip design office in Allentown, rather than Silicon Valley or Asia. But Fotenos of Marvell said the company has to go where the talent is. Both companies have a track record of opening small design offices in areas that have residents with technical sub-specialities.
Chips for hard-disk drives, which store data in computers, portable music players and other products, accounted for 37 percent of Agere's revenue in 2005. Until 2004, Agere was the No. 1 maker of chips for hard-disk drives.
Broadcom competes with Agere in a variety of product areas. It makes chips for cell phones, computer network infrastructure and wireless computing, including Wi-Fi. It reported $2.67 billion in annual revenue in 2005.
Marvell also makes chips for wireless computing and computer network infrastructure. It reported revenue of $1.67 billion for 2005.
Broadcom moved up two places to No. 20 in the 2005 ranking of the world's largest chip companies compiled by research firm Gartner. Marvell moved from No. 42 in 2004 to No. 28 last year. By contrast, Agere moved down six places to No. 34, its lowest ranking since it first appeared on the list in 2002.
Both Marvell and Broadcom were profitable last year.
jeanne.bonner@mcall.com
610-820-6539
A RIVAL COMES TO TOWN
Who: Broadcom
What: A major chip company based in Irvine, Calif., that makes chips for cell phones and wireless computing equipment
What's new: The company plans to open a small chip-design office in the Allentown area to develop semiconductors for hard-disk drives
Employees: Broadcom plans to hire seven or eight engineers in the Allentown office; it employs about 4,300 people worldwide
Revenue: $2.67 billion in 2005
Profit: $411.7 million
For more information: http://www.broadcom.com , or
allentownjobs@broadcom.com
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