The Peru Gazette

The GE lab, which will focus on packaging silicon carbide chips for use in power devices, will be part of the $500 million manufacturing consortium that GE and SUNY Poly created last year, which is setting up a pilot manufacturing line at SUNY Poly’s Albany campus. The GE lab will look at how to package silicon carbide chips into power components such as solar panel inverters, electric vehicles and wind turbines. Two years ago, Cuomo announced the construction of the $125 million Quad-C building as the centerpiece for his $1.5 billion “Nano Utica” program that would focus on computer chip packaging technology research. Ruiz was CEO of Advanced Micro Devices when it struck its historic $1.4 billion deal in 2006 with New York state to build a computer chip factory in Saratoga County. Ruiz confirmed he had looked into possibly buying IBM’s computer chip packaging facility in Bromont, Quebec, earlier this year after IBM unloaded its computer chip manufacturing plants in East Fishkill and Essex Junction, Vt. to GlobalFoundries. The deal with AMS appears to be similar to the one Cuomo negotiated with SolarCity to build a solar panel manufacturing factory in Buffalo. The ownership allows the state and SUNY Poly to keep control of the site instead of giving money directly to a private company, a method Cuomo prefers. The Utica fab will produce analog chips used in sensors and other devices that convert light, sound or vibrations into binary code used to route information in microprocessors.

Source: Utica gets win as Cuomo announces two major chip projects – Times Union