The Raytheon Co. will built out its new Public Safety Regional Technology Center in Downey, Calif., with plans to open the facility by July 1.

The center, which will occupy 27,000 square feet and employ as many as 150 people, will serve as the focus of Raytheon's civil communications business in the western U.S. 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," according to Dan Crowley, president of 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.

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. Raytheon has committed to funding the center at $1 million during three years.