LOS ANGELES, March 7, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN) has selected Downey, Calif., as the location for its new Public Safety Regional Technology Center.  The company is planning to open the facility in the next three months.  

Occupying 27,000 square feet and employing up to 150 people, the new center will serve as the focus of Raytheon's civil communications business in the western United States and provide test and research facilities, training, and maintenance and logistics, customer and systems support.

"The selection of Downey will centrally locate our new center in the greater Los Angeles area, enabling easy access by local public safety professionals to test and certify current and future technologies," said Dan Crowley, president, Raytheon Network Centric Systems. "This latest investment, along with the UCLA Center for Public Safety Network Systems announced earlier this year, further underscores Raytheon's commitment to the public safety market and the region."

Raytheon's Public Safety Regional Technology Center will establish a research capability tailored to public safety needs and will include a consortium of communications experts from academia, industry and public safety agencies. This team will be dedicated to independently verifying future technologies for integration into open architecture, standards-based systems, validating backward compatibility with legacy systems, and testing proposed public safety technologies for today and the future.

In January, Raytheon announced that it had entered into a letter of intent with the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) to form a strategic relationship with the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science for the establishment of the UCLA Center for Public Safety Network Systems. The mission of the center is to bring together academia, industry and public safety agencies to provide technical leadership, a collaborative forum for research as well as the establishment of standards for public safety networks. To lay the foundation for the new center, Raytheon committed to initially contribute $1 million during three years.  

Raytheon Company, with 2010 sales of $25 billion, specializes in defense, homeland security and other government markets throughout the world. With a history spanning 89 years, Raytheon provides state-of-the-art electronics, mission systems integration and other capabilities in the areas of sensing; effects; and command, control, communications and intelligence systems, as well as a broad range of mission support services. With headquarters in Waltham, Mass., Raytheon employs 72,000 people worldwide.

www.raytheon.com

SOURCE Raytheon Company