To free up more room for its accelerating production lines, Cheney-based electronics manufacturer XN Technologies Inc. is more than doubling its floor space this year through construction of a $2.8 million office building at its Cheney site.


Work is under way on the 35,000-square-foot, two-story building at the companys largely undeveloped, 27-acre campus off Cheney-Spokane Road, and the project is scheduled to be completed in December. It will be located just north of a 3-year-old, 25,000-square-foot structure in which all of the companys administrative and manufacturing activities currently are located, and it will be similar in design to that building.


Walker Construction Inc., of Spokane, is the general contractor on the project, and Integrus Architecture PS, of Spokane, designed the building. Those companies worked as contractor and architect, respectively, on the first XN Technologies building.


XN Technologies President Alan Hale says the new structure will house the companys offices and engineering laboratories, allowing it to expand the production space in its current building.


In addition to enjoying growth in its established product lines, which include health care-related electronics and signal-routing equipment, the company introduced a new product earlier this year and hopes to introduce three more before year-end, Hale says.


Were going at a pretty good growth rate, he says.


The product that the company launched earlier is Tiny Tickers, a retail fetal-heartbeat monitoring device that hit the market in May and is sold via the Internet, Hale says. He declines to disclose the products that the company will introduce later this year.


Founded in 1989, XN Technologies also operates an office in Osaka, Japan, and derives about 20 percent of its sales from overseas customers.


Hale declines to disclose the number of people XN Technologies employs, but a manager there said in an interview last year that the company employed 100 people then and was adding people at a rapid clip.