Agere Systems

» see agere.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Agere Systems existed because Lucent Technologies was falling apart and needed to sell the furniture. The company was created in Delaware in 2000 for exactly that purpose, in its own words, as part of the plan to spin off the microelectronics business to Lucent's stockholders. The separation finished in June 2002. What walked out of the building was not a startup: it was decades of Bell Labs semiconductor work, run out of a headquarters on American Parkway in Allentown, Pennsylvania, with a wafer plant in Orlando and assembly lines in Singapore.

The business it landed in was storage. Agere made the integrated circuits that let a hard disk drive find and read what is on the platter, and it sold them to the drive makers rather than to anyone who would ever see the label. In fiscal 2006 it booked $1,570 million of revenue, down six percent, of which $1,442 million was product and $128 million was licensing its patents to other people. Only 17 percent of that money came from inside the United States. It had roughly 5,100 full-time employees, about 1,900 of them in product development, and around 5,850 American patents and applications.

On 3 December 2006 it agreed to merge into LSI Logic. The deal closed on 2 April 2007, with LSI shareholders holding about 52 percent of the result and Agere holders the rest, and four days later LSI amended its charter for the sole purpose of renaming itself LSI Corporation. Agere's Form 15 and its application to delist from the New York Stock Exchange were both filed on the day the merger took effect.

~ the record ~

~ what lucent let go ~

A spin-off is usually described from the parent's side, as a company shedding weight. From Agere's side it reads differently. Lucent kept the name everyone knew and the business everyone could explain, and handed the chip division its own debt alongside a semiconductor market in the worst downturn of its history. Agere's first years went on cutting rather than growing.

The last annual report lists what got cut without much ceremony. One program cut about 550 jobs and closed whole product lines, among them what the filing calls its standalone wireless local area networking chipset, or Wi-Fi, business. Agere walked away from Wi-Fi silicon at the moment Wi-Fi was becoming the thing every laptop shipped with. The Orlando wafer plant stopped running in September 2005. By September 2006 eleven people were still employed at the Orlando site, most of them due to come off the payroll within months.

~ the storage years ~

Reading the 10-K now, the striking thing is how invisible this company arranged to be. Its products are described as going into hard disk drives and mobile phones, which in 2006 covered most of the electronics a person owned. A drive in a desktop in Ankara in 2005 very plausibly had an Agere read channel in it, and nobody using that machine had any way to find out or any reason to.

That is why there is no nostalgia attached to this one and no community that mourns it. Agere never shipped a product with its own name on the outside of the box. When it disappeared into LSI, nothing a consumer could see changed at all.

~ the last annual report ~

Near the front of the fiscal 2006 10-K, in the boilerplate where a company tells you where to find its filings, there is a sentence that has aged into an epitaph: we maintain an Internet website at http://www.agere.com. That domain does not resolve today. It is not parked, not redirected to Broadcom, which eventually inherited this lineage through LSI and Avago. It simply returns nothing, which for a company that spent seven years being the part nobody looked at is a fairly consistent ending.

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