Saline, Mich.—Pro-face America (Glendale, Heights, Ill.), a majority owned subsidiary of Digital Electronics Corp. (Osaka, Japan), recently agreed to buy Xycom Automation. The deal is expected to close in mid-February 2001. Terms were not disclosed. Because Xycom has already been through a "right-sizing" over the past year, no further staff reductions are expected in the near future.

"Acquiring Xycom allows Digital to strengthen its position, share in the industrial PC market, and shows its commitment to open architecture products and the corporate vision of its president, Keizo Wada, who wanted Digital to be the world's largest supplier of human-machine interface products," says Nic Gihl, Pro-face's president.

Mr. Gihl adds that Xycom's product and company names will be retained. Pro-face also plans some embedded computing projects using Xycom's VME-bus products.