Infinera announced it has tentatively agreed to receive up to $93 million in federal funding to expand operations, including in the Lehigh Valley.
“Infinera has been a significant part of the extensive semiconductor sector in the Lehigh Valley that goes back to the development of the transistor by Bell Labs and Western Electric,” said Don Cunningham, President & CEO of Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corp. “Lehigh Valley was the original Silicon Valley, and many of the talented engineers and develops remain here.”
Infinera’s current advanced testing and packaging facility in Upper Macungie employs about 300 people. The proposed funding, from the CHIPS and Science Act, would support construction of a new advanced test and packaging facility in Bethlehem and a new fab in California. The Bethlehem facility would create 291 new manufacturing jobs and 500 construction jobs.
“The federal government’s effort and investment through the CHIPS Act to increase domestic chip production has led to several new projects in the Lehigh Valley including the expansion of Infinera. The region is in a prime position to help America meet its objective to reclaim leadership in the production of semiconductors and other critical technologies.”
In addition to Infinera, the Lehigh Valley is home to technology giants Broadcom, Cisco, Coherent, and Intel, along with new companies such as iDEAL Semiconductor, AAYUNA, and POET Technologies. More than 1,500 people are employed at Lehigh Valley technology companies.
In Upper Macungie, Infinera designs, manufactures, packages, assembles, and tests optoelectronic packages and modules built around its unique optical, compound semiconductor photonic integrated circuits.
Chips produced in California are sent to the 60,000 square-foot operation. They are tested for quality and assembled into modules to be inserted into optical transport equipment used for networking, cloud connectivity, and data center interconnect services.