Irvine Is Expansion Site

Orange County’s high-tech industry may never rival the size and scope of Silicon Valley, but every now and then a small chunk of the northern empire breaks off and migrates south.

Last week, Adaptec Corp., a Milpitas-based manufacturer of computer input/output devices, leased 90,000 square feet of office space in the Irvine Spectrum for what the company says will be its new Irvine Technology Center.

The rapidly growing company makes boards that help computers communicate with each other and send instructions to printers and other so-called peripherals.

Adaptec is setting up a southern satellite partly because it has become increasingly difficult to hire engineers and other researchers in the Silicon Valley’s overheated job market, said company spokesman Bruce Frymire.

“It’s not that you can’t hire people here, but we expect to achieve our goals more quickly in Irvine,” Frymire said. “There’s a lot of highly educated talent there.”

Adaptec, which has 2,300 employees, will remain based in Milpitas. The company already has 50 employees in Orange County through recent acquisitions of two small Irvine companies, Future Domain and Power I/O.

But the new building has room for 250 workers, “and within six months to a year, we expect to be employing that many people,” Frymire said.

Adaptec, which recently signed a letter of intent to buy a business unit from Irvine-based Western Digital Corp., also has a technology center in Boulder, Colo.

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Greg Miller covers high technology for The Times. He can be reached at (714) 966-7830 and at greg.miller@latimes.com