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Billerica-based Axsun Technologies will open a 15,000 square foot facility in Livermore, Calif., to make the manufacturing equipment needed for the production of gear that monitors performance of high-speed telecommunications networks.
Much of today's monitoring equipment is designed for voice networks, and is not suitable for measuring fiberoptic networks that carry traffic on beams of light.
Axsun, which plans to begin producing equipment later this summer, won an exclusive license from the U.S. Department of Energy to use a technique called "LIGA" to make the systems. Neither organization would reveal the amount that Axsun paid for the technology, but an Axsun executive said the company had been trying to figure out a means to build a foundry for it.
LIGA is a German acronym for "lithography, plating and molding." The technology was invented in Germany for use in nuclear reactors, then brought to the United States and further developed at the University of Wisconsin. Most recently Sandia National...