6 Gunmen Steal Computer Chips at Irvine Firm : Crime: It’s the third such robbery in Orange County since February. Bandits ignore other high-tech booty.

Six gunmen robbed a computer company in Irvine of thousands of dollars’ worth of computer chips, the third such robbery in Orange County since February, police said Friday.

Police said they have not linked the robberies, but in each case, employees were forced to the floor and tied up by robbers, who then took all computer chips.

At 5:20 p.m. on Thursday, two employees at Technicad, a computer repair shop on Skypark Circle in Irvine, were getting a last-minute shipment ready when six armed men walked in.

“They pointed a gun at my face,” said one employee, a technical support engineer who declined to give his name. “I just went face down and did whatever he told me.” He was moved to the back room with another employee, and their heads were covered.

“They were only interested in the chips,” the victim said. “There were color monitors, computer equipment . . . It’s almost like they didn’t have room and didn’t take anything bulky. . . . It seemed like they had done it before. They seemed to have their routine down.”

The company reported the loss at about $2,000, but later estimated it was more like $15,000.

Two weeks ago, robbers escaped with more than $100,000 in chips from a firm in Brea, and in February, $2.5 million in computer chips were stolen from another Brea company.

A spate of similar holdups have occurred recently around the state.

In the Bay Area, armed robberies netted hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of chips, prompting computer giant Intel Corp. to announce in October that it will stamp a serial number on computer chips to prevent thefts from the company’s distributors.

“We started to serialize the chips when these robberies started getting violent and people’s lives were in danger,” said John Raftrey, a company spokesman. Intel’s microprocessors, among the chips stolen in the past, serve as the brains of personal computers and are about the size of a poker chip.

*

Bill Hojreh, president of the Irvine-based H. CO. Computer Products said he is increasingly hearing about computer thefts from his competitors.

“They don’t want to hurt you, they just want your product,” he said. “Any chip manufacturer is a target for any theft at anytime.” For example, thieves will sell a stolen module, a piece of plastic linking computer chips, for $1,000 or less, he said.

Computer chips represent a $62 billion business worldwide, with memory chips accounting for $20.8 billion of that, said Sherry Garber, analyst at In-stat Inc., a market research firm in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Price volatility and a high demand for personal computers may be what is causing the spate of robberies.

“There has been such high demand for personal computers that there is a shortage of some kinds of memory chips, and prices have stayed high,” Garber said.

Hojreh’s company, which manufactures $50 million in computer chips a year, stores all of its equipment in a 2,000-pound steel safe at the end of the day, he said.

“If they want to take a torch and melt down my safe, that’s going to take a while for them to do,” Hojreh said. Visitors must also ring an outside door to get into the building, he said.

In Thursday’s robbery one of the victims recalled that two young men who smelled of cigarettes had come into the store on Wednesday looking for work. His boss “told me they were acting very strange, like they were on drugs,” he said. “I’m sure they were casing this place.”