BROCKTON — There's a little piece of Brockton in many Air Force drones, Navy ships and Army tanks.
That's thanks to a little-known company founded here 50 years ago, and that still calls Brockton home. Atrenne designs and builds electrical components for defense and civilian applications. The Brockton area has around 5,400 manufacturing jobs. About 110 of those are at Atrenne's deceptively large facility on Mupac Drive.
"We're a defense company, protecting the warfighter," said Jim Tierney, vice president of aerospace and defense systems.
They do sensitive work in the one-story, 56,000-square foot facility off West Chestnut Street. Atrenne's engineers and workers design and make circuit boards, sheet-metal housings and other components. It's high-tech, but it isn't mass production. The company might make one of something, or 10 of something. Not thousands.
The attention to detail is personal for John Forte, director of operations.
"I want to make sure that stuff we send out there is the best," said Forte, who has a son in the Army.
Bob Forsberg founded the company, which grew out of a contract cable assembly business on Summer Street. The company was originally known as Mupac, which stands for "Micro Electronic Packaging."
Since the company's founding in 1972, its products have played key roles outside the military too. The company's wire-wrap boards helped control the first space shuttle launch. And you'll find Atrenne controls in medical devices you've experienced first-hand, like magnetic resonance imaging machines.
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Brockton has a history of supplying the military. Union soldiers held their ground in Brockton-made shoes on battlefields like Gettysburg, for instance.
The components Atrenne makes have to withstand extremes no Civil War soldier would have experienced. Their assemblies in drones have to work in -70 degree temperatures at 40,000 feet. Those same components can't fail when the drone dives to scorching heat at ground level in the desert. Rust famously never sleeps, and Atrenne components on Navy ships have to hold up against continual salt spray.
The company's products are often critical for what the acronym-happy military calls ISR: intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. These solutions provide real-time, actionable information. And when they say real time, they mean it. In a sliver of a second or less, ISR systems identify an object's "ballistic signature," whether it's friend or foe and even what type of ammunition it's using.
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Design is the heart of the organization.
"We solve technical problems and manufacture [the solutions]," Tierney said.
Over the years, the company could easily have moved to Cambridge, the 128 tech corridor or tech havens in California or overseas. But it has stayed put, providing good jobs to generations of local engineers, inside salespeople, mechanical assemblers, painters and quality-control experts.
"Right in their backyard in the city of Brockton they were able to work for a high-tech company," said Tierney.
The company has endured while other Boston-area tech companies flamed out. The list is long, but includes names you know like Polaroid, Wang and Digital.
Walk the halls at Atrenne and you'll encounter a high percentage of employees with more than 10 years on the job.
"You go to work happy and you come home happy," said Linda Fitzgerald, who has worked at Atrenne for 15 years and currently greets visitors at the front desk.
The company will be holding an invitation-only 50th anniversary celebration later this month.
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