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17 Jun 2002
Brooks Automation of the US has completed its acquisition of Irvine Optical Company, exchanging approximately 310,000 shares of Brooks stock and assuming $7.1 million of debt in the $30 million transaction.
"What Irvine brings is a nice niche filler in the Brooks product offering," said Jim Chiafery, the Director of Investor Relations and Public Relations Brooks Automation. "They are a big player in sorters."
Sorters can randomize wafers in a cassette. "Randomization is a way of evening out process quirks and sensors typically do that," Chiafery explained.
Irvine Sensors' sales consist of approximately 75 percent sorters, 20 percent wafer insertion stations, and 5 percent parts and spares. The wafer insertion stations will also add to Brooks' product line.
The acquisition also allows interface between the ambient clean room air of the wafer fabrication facilities and the ultra-pure environment of the process tools produced by Brooks Automation. "The synergies are especially evident when you combine our factory tool interface," Chiafery noted.
Irvine Optical Company was founded in 1975 and currently has approximately 90 employees. Brooks, which is based in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, but which is a subsidiary of the Germany corporation Jenoptik AG, has no plans to relocate Irvine Optical Company's employees from the current facility in Burbank, California. "They've got a pretty good operation, and we don't want to fix what's not broken," said Chiafery.
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