OCC’s new Micron clean room is being built with college’s largest donation ever

Syracuse, N.Y. – Construction is underway at the Micron Technology clean room laboratory at Onondaga Community College, being built and outfitted with the largest donation ever made to the college.

Micron has pledged $5 million toward the lab, which will be named the Micron Cleanroom Simulation Lab. Onondaga County and New York state are also contributing $5 million each in taxpayer money.

The 5,000-square-foot clean room will be used to train students for jobs in semiconductor plants like Micron’s. The clean room is one of many ways Micron is trying to meet the daunting challenge of providing enough workers to operate the fabrication plants, or fabs.

“It’s on track to open the first quarter of 2025,” college President Warren Hilton said recently. “We’re excited about that.”

Micron’s $5 million will be a combination of cash and machinery, said college spokesman Roger Mirabito. Any machines installed in the clean room will be the property of OCC, he said.

Micron’s contribution will be paid out over 10 years, Hilton said.

Mirabito said that Micron’s donation is the largest the college has ever received. The college has received two donations of $1 million apiece, he said.

While the state and county’s contributions will be public, Micron’s won’t. That’s because Micron will funnel the money through the nonprofit Onondaga Community College Foundation.

“Any gifts/donations to the college go through the OCC Foundation, including Micron’s,” Mirabito said in an email. “This is a typical arrangement within higher education.”

The college says the foundation is a separate, private entity and not subject to freedom of information laws. That’s despite the fact that two of its three staff members are high-ranking college employees, the foundation offices are on campus, and the foundation’s sole purpose is to raise money for the college.

Micron announced in 2022 it plans to build four massive computer chip fabrication plants, or fabs, in Clay through 2043. If fully built, the complex would employ 9,000 people and create 40,000 spinoff jobs.

Micron plans to begin construction of the first fab in 2025 and start producing chips there within three years. Each of the fabs would have a 600,000-square-foot clean room filled with machines that can cost up to $500 million each.

Clean rooms in fabs have extensive air filtration equipment to keep dust particles from damaging the high-precision silicon wafers that become computer chips. Workers inside clean rooms wear white “bunny suits” to contain any contaminants on their bodies or clothes.

Air in the OCC lab will be much cleaner than a typical office, but a commercial fab clean room would have 10,000 times fewer particles than OCC’s will.

The lab is being built in the Whitney Applied Technology Center, which sits near the SRC Arena. The general contractor, PAC Construction, of Oswego, is being paid $1.16 million for the first phase, Mirabito said. The electrical firm on the job, Patricia Electric, of Syracuse, is getting nearly $199,000, he said.

The project is being handled by Onondaga County, which oversees all construction projects at the college. Syracuse.com filed a Freedom of Information Law request with the county on Feb. 16 for the construction contracts, but the county has not yet provided them.