| Industry | Semiconductor-Integrated Circuits |
|---|---|
| Fate | Merged into LSI Corporation |
| Successor | LSI Corporation |
| Founded | spun off from Lucent Technologies on June 1, 2002 |
| Defunct | April 2, 2007 |
| Headquarters | Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA |
| Key people | Richard L. Clemmer, President & CEO |
| Products | Integrated Circuits |
| Employees | ~17,000 |
Agere Systems Inc. was an integrated circuit components company based in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Spun out of Lucent Technologies in 2002, Agere was merged into LSI Corporation in 2007.[1][2][3][4]
Agere was incorporated on August 1, 2000 as a subsidiary of Lucent Technologies and then spun off on June 1, 2002. The name Agere was that of a Texas-based electronics company that Lucent had acquired in 2000, although the pronunciations of the company names are different. The Texas company was pronounced with three syllables and a hard "g": A-gear-uh. The company name was pronounced with two syllables and a hard "g": A-gear.
Apart from the main office in Allentown, the company maintained also offices in:
Microsoft was sued by Agere for theft of key technology used in Internet telephony.[5][6][7] The allegations concern meetings between Agere and Microsoft in 2002 and 2003, where the companies discussed selling Agere's stereophonic acoustic echo cancellation technology to Microsoft. This technology is used to improve the sound of telephone and teleconference communications over the Internet (i.e., VOIP). Just before the agreement was to be signed, Microsoft ended the discussions saying that it made a significant breakthrough in its own, heretofore undisclosed research program, and no longer needed Agere's technology.
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