LONDON – Analog and mixed-signal chip company Maxim Integrated Products Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) said it plans to spend $200 million to upgrade its U.S. wafer fabs in Beaverton, Ore.; Dallas and San Antonio, Texas; and San Jose. The investment also will create additional manufacturing jobs, Maxim said, without providing numbers.
The company said the multiyear investment is consistent with previously disclosed capital expenditure plans for Maxim’s 2012 and 2013 fiscal years. The money would be used to upgrade manufacturing equipment, improve process technologies, convert to newer technology nodes and assimilate production from recently acquired companies, Maxim said.
Maxim employs 9,300 people worldwide of which approximately 1,000 work in manufacturing cleanrooms in its four U.S. fabs. Maxim said it expects to add manufacturing staff as expansions are completed and it ramps production.
"Maxim has an extremely talented workforce doing technology development in Silicon Valley and cost-competitive manufacturing in our U.S. wafer fabs, where we make about 50 percent of our products," Tunc Doluca, president and CEO of Maxim, said in a statement. "We are investing in our U.S. infrastructure to build intellectual property and enable a competitive edge."
Maxim has won recognition from local bodies in Beaverton and San Antonio for energy and water efficiency measures it has taken at its fabs.
What is significant in this picture of Surface Mount Technology’s shop floor is the fact that the back wall is temporary, allowing for quick expansion when more work comes in.
We visited this upper Midwestern manufacturing hub (in the 1960s, the “Fox River Valley” was home to nearly a dozen paper mills) to get a closer look at the forces shaping the electronics supply chain. We also wanted to find out whether anecdotal reports about electronics manufacturing returning to the U.S. are true. To a limited extent, we found, electronic components like LED modules are now being redesigned and manufactured again at places like Surface Mount Technology.
The other piece of good news is that the Wisconsin company has laid out its design, prototyping and manufacturing facility that currently employs 140 workers with a temporary wall to allow for quick expansion. The employee parking lot was full on the day we visited, and company executives said they are currently running three shifts six days a week to keep up with orders from its current roster of 85 customers.
