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Tempe will be home to a new national research lab for semiconductor microchips

Machine makes microchips
Getty Images
Machine makes microchips

Arizona State University and the state government have teamed up to bring a national research lab for microchip technology to Tempe. It’s part of a national effort to boost semiconductor chip manufacturing.

Sally Morton with ASU’s Knowledge Enterprise said building the new Tempe-based facility will take roughly three years.

“So you might imagine we're going to wait for three years before anything will happen,” said Morton. “But that will not actually be true because, fortunately, Arizona State University has a similar facility already in the Research Park and we've offered to the Department of Commerce that they can use space.”

This will allow researchers, she said, to hit the ground running.

“Arizona, and specifically the Arizona State University Research Park in Tempe, has been chosen as the location for the third of three CHIPS for America Research and Development flagship facilities,” said Morton, “so we've been chosen to … work on behalf of the nation with respect to packaging and prototyping and semiconductors.”

The chips’ packaging, she explained, guards them against the elements, radiation, and more so they can connect to other parts of the device they make work.

“They're a bit easy to ignore because we don't see them,” Morton said, “but they are part of all of our everyday lives and they're becoming more so.”

Which is why Morton emphasized the importance of using home-grown research for the U.S. to supply itself with microchips and improve on the technology.

Kirsten Dorman is a field correspondent at KJZZ. Born and raised in New Jersey, Dorman fell in love with audio storytelling as a freshman at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in 2019.
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