A St. Charles County-based semiconductor producer will receive part of a $400 million Biden Administration award to bolster the nation’s semiconductor industry. It will be used to help MEMC construct a new center to produce silicon wafers for semiconductor chips in national defense and aerospace.
The effort will also create 500 construction jobs and 130 manufacturing jobs.
Site General Manager Karla Chaney told Missourinet that there’s a reason the O’Fallon center was chosen.
“What we do no other site in our company does and very few people in the world do it,” Chaney said. “There’s a limited competition for what we make. So, it only made sense that you would expand and put that investment into the existing site and not try to recreate it somewhere else.”
Chaney said that COVID helped people to realize the importance of semiconductors, calling it an issue of national security.
“What some of these materials and even our customers’ products go into, we really don’t want to be duplicated overseas, right? We don’t want to be to be purchasing, as a U.S. economy, these things from overseas,” she explained. “So, this is all an effort to bring it on shore.”
Semiconductors are the building blocks of modern technology seen in today’s vehicles, smart phones, and video game systems.
“(Our products) can withstand harsh environments, and space is a harsh environment,” she said. “So, this is the material of choice for certain space applications and defense. Those designs are how we have an advantage over other global entities.”
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