National Semiconductor Corp’s Fairchild division has announced 220 layoffs at its South Portland, Maine and West Jordan, Utah plants and its UK operation could be next to go under the knife as early as next week. The firm is cutting back, predicting a drop in customer orders for its older logic and memory products. Trying to temper the good with the bad, Nat Semi simultaneously announced it’s investing $181m – in addition to a previous $830m injection – in its 200mm wafer fab plant under construction in South Portland. The company said it won’t be able to transfer all the laid off staff to the new plant, which has 343 vacancies, as the new plant won’t reach full employment until early 1998. It’ll announce how many will make the short walk to the new plant within 60 days. Nat Semi span off its logic and memory products into the Fairchild division last month (CI No 2,939) to ensure the mass-market product line would be able to react to market trends quicker. We didn’t want our Maine-based multiple markets business to bear the cost of research and development overhead from National Semiconductor’s other product lines, the firm said yesterday.
