HARRISBURG, PA - Tyco Electronics Corp. will close its Austin PCB manufacturing plant by July 1, and lay off about 190 employees, according to a news article.

Mike Ratcliff, a spokesman for Tyco, told a local paper that work from the 240,000 sq.-ft. plant will be transfered to other Tyco plants. The Austin location has stopped taking orders for PCBs but will fulfill existing orders.

"The printed circuit group has been evaluating how best to operate the business, reduce costs where possible and eliminate duplication," Ratcliff says. "It's a competitive industry."

Tyco purchased the plant from Raytheon, which in turn obtained it through a large purchase of the defense business from Texas Instruments.

There has been no report at this time of other Tyco operations closing down.

TOKYO -- Kyocera Corp. has made plans to outsource its cell phone production in North America to Flextronics International and cut 1,700 jobs at its mobile phone division to turn the loss-making business around.

The latest restructuring follows Kyocera's announcement in March that it will quit its struggling digital camera operations this year. The company will outsource production at U.S. unit Kyocera Wireless Corp. to Flextronics from late May.

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BOSTON --  Nepcon East, the longtime expo for electronics assembly, took place under chilly conditions in Boston. But that didn't deter decent-sized crowds from checking out the latest equipment and materials.

The biggest exhibitors were Universal, Assembleon and Bosch Rexroth. Some notable local suppliers chose to forego exhibiting while competitors made the trip to Boston. For example, of the three leading screen printer suppliers in North America, NJ-based DEK exhibited, although Speedline Technologies and EKRA America, both of which are based in the Boston suburbs, did not.

Numerous bare-board fabrication (MEI, Bare Board Group, Circuit Connect, Printed Circuit Corp., Sierra Proto Systems) and assembly companies (Masstech EMS and LightSpeed Manufacturing among others) were on hand. Most told Circuits Assembly that business growth was modest year-to-date and orders for lead-free boards were few and far between.

Among the highlights:

• Juki Automation, the second leading seller of placement machines worldwide, rolled out a pair of selective soldering units. Called the 300L and 400L, the machines come with internal spray or drop-jet fluxers, nozzles ranging from 4 mm to 30 mm and preheat capability, and the 400L has a three-stage inline system for high-speed automated soldering. The 400L can also be customized for three miniwaves or a combination of one miniwave and one full wave.
  
• Datron Dynamics, a supplier of milling and routing equipment for assemblers, showed off its new low-cost (under $47,000) CNC machine for milling and engraving. The mini-Raptor has a 51 x 51" footprint and comes with a 60,000 rpm spindle, a solid granite table and a 3-tool changer feed. It is said to reach rates up to 400" per minute.
  
• Excelta is offering the Smart Tweezer, a slick little device that among other things IDs the capacitance, resistance or inductance of the surface mount device being picked up.
  

Once a major convention in its own right, the expo has morphed into a solid regional show. It was in its third location in three years, having shifted this year to the brand new Boston Convention Center, a mammoth (510,000 sq. ft.) hall located on a pier just east of downtown.

Official attendance numbers have not yet been released.

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Oyster Bay, NY -- Annual global sales of "dual-mode" mobile phones -- which can connect to either a conventional cellular service or a Wi-Fi network -- are likely to exceed 100 million by 2010, according to a new study by ABI Research.

Dual-mode handsets have been virtually unknown to consumers until recently, and have not penetrated the enterprise space to any degree either.

But according to ABI Research senior analyst Philip Solis, some of the giants of global telecommunications -- notably British Telecom and Korea Telecom -- plan to offer dual-mode services by the end of 2005. That could start a very large ball rolling.

"The advantages of dual mode handsets and services, when they arrive, can be summed up in two words: seamless and economical," Solis said. Though the full spectrum of capabilities won't appear in the first generation of products, when these services are mature you will be able to start a phone call at home (connecting to residential Wi-Fi network and then broadband VOIP phone service), continue it in your car (switching to your cellular provider's network) and wind it up at work (phone switches to 802.11 LAN, and VoIP). The handset would sense the available signals and switch automatically from one network mode to another.

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