Students in several classes already are using the $5 million of equipment that has come from Micron factories around the world.
“We have a facility now where students can train to be technicians at Micron, but technicians at other places as well,” said OCC President Warren Hilton. “This is great news for Central New York and great news for people who want jobs.”
The college will hold a grand opening today, but students in several classes are using the 3,000-square-foot space, said John Sly, who worked at Micron for 12 years before joining OCC’s faculty last year.
Micron announced plans in 2022 to construct up to four massive fabrication plants, or fabs, in the town of Clay to produce billions of memory chips each year. Each fab will have a 600,000-square-foot cleanroom, the size of 10 football fields.
Micron says it would have 9,000 employees when the fourth fab is fully operational in 2045. About a third of those jobs would be for technicians, which Micron has estimated would earn about $70,000 per year.
The cleanroom was originally scheduled to open last spring, but delays in setting up the equipment donated by Micron pushed the opening by a semester. Onondaga County spent about $100,000 on vendors to install and calibrate the machines, according to county records.
Total construction cost was $9.6 million, shared equally by the state and county, records show.
Micron was originally expected to provide $2.5 million in equipment, but that grew to $5 million to outfit the cleanroom. Micron has also given the college $500,000 toward a $2.5 million payment for scholarships and other educational uses, Micron said.
The commitment to OCC’s cleanroom was one of Micron’s first financial overtures to prove its commitment to Central New York — and to train a workforce for Micron and its attendant suppliers.
A cleanroom is a large manufacturing space where dust and other particles are removed so they don’t damage products like semiconductor wafers. The OCC cleanroom was always planned as a simulation; the cost of creating a cleanroom equivalent to one Micron uses to make chips was too costly.
The machines in the OCC simulator came from Micron plants in Idaho, Virginia, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan, a college spokesman said.
The OCC cleanroom will train students to work in any industry that uses similar spaces, including high-tech manufacturing and food processing.
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