Tech Roundup: Zollner’s Milpitas Facility Nears Completion, Cisco Lawyer Calls H-P’s Suing of Ex-Employees ‘Desperate,’ and More

Zollner Elektronik AG and its USA division , announced last week that its “state-of-the-art” Milpitas facility is near completion. John Burke, general manager, said the company is now wrapping up equipment installations and testing, advanced training and process installations, which should be finished within the next week or two. He said the company has already started taking occupancy of the Cottonwood Drive facility. The facility’s service offerings will include low- to medium-volume manufacturing capabilities from board-level to systems in addition to tailor-made logistics solutions. A grand opening celebration is scheduled for mid-December.

In a recent blog on the company’s website, Cisco General Counsel Mark Chandler blasted competitor Hewlett-Packard for trying to use litigation to block former employees from accepting jobs with Cisco. Chandler—known for freely speaking his mind—called the company’s efforts “desperate moves” by a company “beset by the chaos of executive turnover.” One example provided included the story of a 20-year veteran of H-P who quit his job to move out of state with his family. Even halfway across the country, H-P tried to prevent the man from accepting a job with Cisco in his new state, attempting to enforce a “non-compete” clause the man had signed when he accepted his job at H-P more than two decades earlier.

Milpitas-based Linear Technology came to the end of an eight-year court battle recently, in which it sued Novellus Systems and Tokyo Electron Corp. in a protracted breach of contract fight over semiconductor processing equipment. Unfortunately, a California court of appeals upheld a defense judgment in favor of the other two companies, leaving Linear Tech on the hook for a whopping $8.4 million in legal fees.

Online reports indicate that Sunnyvale-based Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has canceled a large order for APUs that Milpitas-based Globalfoundries Inc. was supposed to make for them. Instead AMD, will allegedly start afresh using the 28-nm gate-last high-k metal-gate manufacturing process technology from alternative foundry, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. out of Hsinchu, Taiwan, the reports said. It is speculated that the reason for the move is because Globalfoundries Inc. wouldn’t be able to deliver the APUs until mid-2012, which would only give the planned processors six months in the market.