In the first six months of 2011, TriQuint will likely bring aboard roughly 100 temporary workers who will likely become full-timers within 6-9 months after they’re hired, according to local officials. “The demand for our products is really going up,” Howard Witham, vice president of Texas operations at TriQuint, said in an interview.
Wages vary for the jobs that TriQuint is filling in Richardson, as the positions range from engineers, designers and technicians to support professionals, salespeople and marketers, officials said, adding that most of the spots pay well.
In addition to the new hires in Richardson, TriQuint will bring in new equipment for making its chips and other components, which are used in various electronics. Among other things, TriQuint will be adding capacity to print its chips on 6-inch wafers made of a compound called gallium arsenide.
The plant currently manufactures its chips on 4-inch wafers. The 6-inch wafers will provide the basis for making more chips. “It means more real estate on the wafer,” Witham said.
Work has begun on bringing in the new 6-inch wafer equipment, and it should be operational by the 2nd or 3rd quarter of 2011, Witham said.
TriQuint has chosen vendors for the new equipment, and those suppliers have selected subcontractors to help with related work on its mechanical and electrical infrastructure. “These tools are big, bulky and heavy, and you need people to help you bring them into the facility,” Witham said.
TriQuint’s Richardson facility, the company’s largest manufacturing center, sits on roughly 38 acres of land at 500 W. Renner Road. The 540,000-square-foot facility includes around 48,000 square feet of “clean room” space, which has very low levels of environmental pollutants such as dust or chemical vapors. The rule of thumb is that clean rooms cost around $2,000 per square foot, according to Witham.
TriQuint is using around two-thirds of the clean room at its Richardson plant. The company has enough real estate to accommodate its expansion needs locally, officials said.
Two of TriQuint’s three major operations are based in Richardson: its defense and aerospace unit, whose products are used by the likes of Lockheed Martin Corp., Northrop Grumman Corp. and Raytheon Co., and its networks business, whose technology aids in the transfer of phone calls and data across wireless and wired networks.
The defense and aerospace business is a “good, steady business, with modest growth,” Witham said. The networks business is a big growth area, especially in developing countries that don’t have much wired telecom infrastructure, and are instead building out wireless systems, he added.
In 2009, defense and aerospace accounted for roughly 12% of the company’s $654.3 million in revenue, according to TriQuint’s annual report. That would mean defense and aerospace brought in $78 million, while the networks segment, which clocked 25% of sales, accounted for closer to $163.5 million. The third major segment, called mobile devices, was 63% of sales, according to the company.
On a stand-alone basis for 2009, the Richardson plant accounted for about 42% of TriQuint’s net fixed assets and roughly 18% of revenue, the annual report says.
TriQuint uses high-performance, specialized materials for its chips and other components. Semiconductors made in Richardson, for instance, are built using gallium arsenide, a dark gray compound that allows electrons to move as much as five times faster than silicon, the basis for most of the world’s chips. That enables the Richardson-made chips to deliver better speed and performance with less “noise,” extraneous signals or other disturbances.
TriQuint says the market for its chips is not affected by concerns of overproduction. The flip side: Chips that use gallium arsenide cost more than silicon-based chips, according to Will Strauss, president of the Arizona market research firm Forward Concepts. Partly for that reason, silicon has been the most-used base for chips, while gallium arsenide is a “niche,” Strauss said.
by Jeff Bounds, Dallas Business Journal