COMPANIES LIKE BROADCOM AND CONEXANT TEND TO MAKE THE BIG headlines
(as they do on page 1 of this issue). But sometimes the companies making little headlines can, in aggregate, say just as much about how Orange County is emerging as a major center of “broadband communications”,the chips, the wires, the networks and the software that are dramatically speeding up the flow of information, and changing the way we work and play.
In the past few issues, for example, we’ve had these items:
n Intersil Corp., a maker of chips and other electronics used in wireless computer networks, moving its 50-person headquarters from Palm Bay, Fla. to the Irvine Spectrum. CEO Greg Williams said Irvine was chosen in part because it had high-tech cachet, but lower costs than Silicon Valley.
n Entridia Corp., an Irvine startup that designs chips used in Internet routing gear, closing another, $10 million round of financing.
n Bay Area-based Intarsia Corp. announcing the opening of a networking design center in Orange that will employ a dozen engineers. “There is a lot of wireless design activity going on in Southern California, and there are a lot of skilled and talented people down there,” a company official said.
Call it what you will,critical-mass making, clustering, infrastructure building, agglomeration. None of these items is “big” news by itself, but they add up to a big story.
