Johnson Matthey Sees Jump In Electronics Work Company Still Looking To Hire More Than Two Dozen Employees

With a recovery taking place in the semiconductor industry, Johnson Matthey Electronics has been hiring more employees at its facilities in Cheney and the Spokane Valley.

Johnson Matthey’s electronics group, which was bought by Allied Signal for $655 million earlier this year, employs about 750 in Spokane.

When Intel began producing the Pentium III microchip last year - shifting from the Pentium II - Johnson Matthey’s Cheney plant, which makes chip accessories called heat sinks and thermal plates, lost its key contract.

As a result, the company’s work force in Cheney fell to less than 100, said Bruce Nelson, Johnson Matthey’s general manager in Spokane.

Now, the facility is doing similar heatsink work for Advanced Micro Devices’ K-7 chip, a competitor to the Intel Celeron and Pentium III processors.

“That’s what’s really driving Cheney right now,” Nelson said of the AMD work. Thermal plate jobs for Hewlett-Packard and IBM are also being conducted in Cheney.

Johnson Matthey now has about 130 employees and is looking to fill more than two dozen positions - a marked change from the many layoff notices the company issued last year and earlier this year.

In August, IC Insights, an Arizona consulting company, forecast that world-wide semiconductor markets would increase 13 percent over 1998.

Johnson Matthey’s core Spokane operation makes a variety of products used in microprocessors, said Nelson.

Meanwhile, as details of Johnson Matthey’s merger with Allied Signal are ironed out, Allied Signal awaits approval from the Justice Department and European regulators for its pending merger with Honeywell.

Johnson Matthey Electronics will change its name to Honeywell following the completion of the merger, expected sometime this fall.