Integra Technologies to create 2,500+ jobs, put HQ in Bel Aire, training in Wichita
23 February 2023
WICHITA, Kan. (KSNW) — The month of February has seen major economic news for Kansas.
First came the announcement of Integra Technologies’ plan to build a semiconductor manufacturing plant that will be constructed in Bel Aire in Sedgwick County. The 100-acre facility will bring over 2,500 high-paying jobs and bring more than $2 billion in capital investment in the first five years. Then there was the announcement that EMP Shield plans to build a $1.9 billion computer chip manufacturing facility in Burlington in Coffey County.
Both companies will be seeking partial funding for their plants under the CHIPS Act. The act signed into law by President Biden created $280 billion in new funding to boost domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors.
The law is a byproduct of the pandemic, which saw shortages in everything from computers and game systems to cars due to the shortage of microchips. Most semiconductors are manufactured in China and other overseas countries.
Kansas is mainly known for its agriculture and airplane manufacturing. However, you could argue that we are responsible for an innovation that has advanced human civilization by leaps and bounds, affecting nearly every facet of our lives.
In the 1940s, a young Jack S. Kilby graduated from Great Bend High School and headed off to the University of Illinois. He would receive a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering there, eventually obtaining a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee while working for a lab there.
In 1958, he was employed at Texas Instruments in Dallas. While working alone one July because everyone else was out on a summer break, Kilby started thinking about the Tyranny of Numbers problem — The issue wasn’t that you couldn’t design a computer that would do anything you want it to do. The problem is you could never build it.
Back then, computers were made up of groups of circuit boards that were connected together into modules that would perform different functions in the computer.
All of those modules would then be wired together with miles of wiring. This meant computers could take up whole buildings and cost the modern equivalent of millions just to do something we could do today in a matter of milliseconds on a desktop computer.
Kilby thought about this problem and wondered if you could skip all the wiring by carving the modules on a singular material and placing that directly on the circuit board. Kilby’s invention became the integrated circuit, better known as the microchip.
Kilby owned nine patents related to his invention, and in 2000 he received the Noble Prize in Physics for his discovery. He died of cancer in 2005 at the age of 81.