Agilent Technologies

Agilent Technologies, or Agilent, is an American company that designs and manufactures electronic and bio-analytical measurement instruments and equipment for measurement and evaluation. Many of Agilent's predecessor product lines were developed by Hewlett-Packard, the American computing company founded in 1939. In 1999, the product lines not directly connected with computers, storage, and imaging were grouped into a separate company (Agilent), the stock of which was offered to the public in an initial public offering. The Agilent IPO may have been the largest in the history of Silicon Valley at the time. The company thus created in 1999 was an $8 billion company with about 47,000 employees, manufacturing scientific instruments, semiconductors, optical networking devices, and electronic test equipment for telecom and wireless R&D and production. Agilent's major product lines include: Test and measurement products such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, signal generators, spectrum analyzers, vector network analyzers, atomic force microscopes (AFM), automated optical inspection, automated X-ray inspection (5DX), in-circuit test, and electronic design automation (EDA) software (EEsof) Life science and chemical analysis products such as DNA microarrays, liquid and gas chromatographs, mass spectrometers, nuclear magnetic resonance, molecular and atomic spectroscopy products, remanufactured test equipment with discounts ranging from 20% to 50%. In addition to measuring hardware, Agilent has generated and offers comprehensive chemical databases. In January 2009 it announced the availability of a pesticide database covering 1600 compounds, with accurate mass information for each. It also announced the proximate release of similar databases for toxicology and drugs of abuse.