2 O.C. Projects Get Piece of Peace Technology Pie : Awards: Newport Beach-based program received $20 million and Cal State Fullerton $1.9 million.

Orange County is likely to play a key role in the Clinton Administration’s $2.5-billion technology reinvestment program, if the first wave of awards is any indication.

The second largest of the nearly $140 million in grants announced Thursday--estimated at $20 million with the potential to grow to $30 million--went to a consortium of electronics companies chaired by Hughes Aircraft’s commercial and industrial sector microelectronics division in Newport Beach.

A second award of $1.9 million went to Cal State Fullerton for a pair of programs to retrain defense industry engineers.

The program chaired by Hughes is an ambitious project to develop the foundation for a nationwide manufacturing base to supply the equipment needed to churn out so-called multi-chip modules, the next generation of electronic circuits, in a cost-effective manner.

Uriel Sokolov, manager of strategic business development at Hughes’ Newport Beach facility and chairman of the consortium, said the effort, if successful, will help the United States’ electronics industry recapture the dominant world position it lost to foreign electronics firms in the early 1980s.

“If we don’t pursue this,” he said, “then our friends across the Pacific river will really eat our lunch.”

Multi-chip modules enable integrated circuits to communicate at ever faster speeds. Each of the companies in the consortium is working on its own designs, Sokolov said. The joint effort will be to develop universal manufacturing equipment to lower the cost of producing them for commercial and consumer use.

Consortium members “will come up with specifications for what is needed and then talk to the equipment manufacturers to see what can be done,” Sokolov said. “Then we will take competitive bids and the winners will make the equipment.”

Although little of the money in the initial award will be spent in Newport Beach, Sokolov predicted that his company will be a major beneficiary--and a major source of new jobs--if the project succeeds because it will make Hughes globally competitive.

At Cal State Fullerton, the largest award--$1.1 million--will fund a program to retrain 90 defense industry engineers to refocus their skills on improving the environment. An additional $800,000 will finance a program to design a curriculum in manufacturing engineering, in conjunction with four other campuses.

Andy Bazar, dean of the School of Engineering and Computer Science at Cal State Fullerton, said the goal of the retraining program “is to give them new marketable experience so that they can keep their original training and get new training to have a dual use. That way, if the defense industry picks up again they can go back. Otherwise, they can stay with their new jobs.”

Those new jobs, he said, will largely be with small companies working in such areas as pollution control, waste water control and designing new products for a cleaner environment.

Bazar said the 90 defense workers, scheduled to begin classes in January, will be recruited through newspaper ads and referrals from local companies. In addition, he said, the companies will provide guest lecturers and input on the curriculum.

“We can’t guarantee employment,” Bazar said, “but with the skills we give (the laid-off engineers), they will be very employable. I would imagine they will get jobs. The demand right now for environmental engineering is very good.”

The second grant will fund a program that “will play a major role in educating manufacturing engineers of the 20th Century for the state of California,” Bazar said. “We really don’t have enough of them in this country; we are lagging behind Japan and Germany.”

In training manufacturing engineers--who design methods of production for factories--the university hopes to offer an alternative to students who otherwise might study defense-related engineering, Bazar said.

Starting with about 60 students in January, Bazar said, the university hopes to be awarding about 30 bachelor’s degrees each year by the year 2000. While the program initially will be taught by existing faculty members, he said, eventually new ones may be added.

“We already have the knowledge and expertise on campus,” he said, “and we already have good facilities.” Eventually, Bazar said, the program should be self-sustaining.