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Michael Kozicki:
The State of Texas was supporting their bid to the tune of, I mean something like $600 million we didn't have that kind of state support. And again, we had, don't get me wrong, it's not that the state doesn't love us and doesn't support us, but we didn't have $600 million to put into this process, and yet we still won. And what does that tell you? Yeah, it tells you we're good, we're damn good at what we're doing here, and we're seen as a rising star in semiconductors.
Connor Greenwall:
Arizona is becoming one of the most interesting places in the world for tech. Arizona has found itself at the center of the semiconductor manufacturing world, and ASU is at the center of that. In January 2025, ASU was selected as the location of a national laboratory for advanced semiconductor packaging.
However, his is not an unwarranted acquisition, Arizona has been at the cutting edge of the semiconductor industry since the 1980s, and the seeds had been planted as far back as World War 2. How has ASU found itself at the center of the semiconductor world, how did we get here, and where will they go next?
I’m Connor Greenwall, and welcome back to State Press Play.
Michael Kozicki:
I am a professor of electrical engineering and a 40 year veteran this year of Arizona State. I'm also the graduate program chair in electrical engineering.
Connor Greenwall:
And how did you get into electrical engineering?
Michael Kozicki:
Ah, I was one of these, these crazy kids that love tinkering with electronics when, even when it was very, very young, my dad was an electrical engineer. So it was, it was pretty easy for me to get into the hardware side of things. You know, putting putting together amplifiers and power supplies and stuff like that. Thoroughly enjoyed that. And I definitely decided when it was probably still in the single digits age wise, that I wanted to be electrical engineer.
Connor Greenwall:
So it's kind of like the family business?
Michael Kozicki:
Kind of, sorry, yeah, I guess you could say that respect.
Connor Greenwall:
So when you were going down the road of electric electrical engineering, what was your like Academic path like?
Michael Kozicki:
Oh, academic path I, I grew up, you know, in the in the 60s in Scotland, watching the the Apollo missions and and I never, I never, ever wanted to be a space man, but I definitely wanted to be involved in high tech. And always saw the US as being, the place to be. And so at a pretty early age, I charted a path that would take me to the University of Edinburgh, which is an extremely good kind of world renowned school for Engineering and Physical Sciences and the likes. And I decided I'd do an undergraduate there, I do a PhD there, I'd go and work for an American company and then get transferred to the US. Basically. I know it sounded, sounds kind of weird for a little kid to have these kind of dreams, but all made sense to me, but, and it almost worked, except that the American company I went to work with found me a little too valuable there in Scotland, so they didn't want to transfer me, so I took literally the first job that came along, and that was ASU.
To hear more from Connor and Michael please tune in to State Press Play.
Connor Greenwall:
It can be difficult to conceptualize how small a semiconductor is. They are much smaller than you could even imagine, and then still smaller than that.
A human hair is about 100,000 nanometers. Modern semiconductor chips are usually around 10 nanometers. The human brain isn’t capable of understand something the size of just atoms.
To help explain how small semiconductors are, I toured the ASU NanoFab on the Tempe campus in the Engineering research building. Kevin Hilgers, from the fab, helped conceptualize the magnitude, or the MICROtude, of how small semiconductors are.
Kevin Hilgers:
So to give you an idea, this, this building here, the ERC building, the engineering research building. I don't know what it is, a six or seven story tall building, right? And if you were to take a piece of paper, which is about 100 microns, 100 times 10 to the minus six meters, okay, it's about the same thickness as your hair, right? Okay, so if you were to take a piece of paper or your hair and you'd blow it up to the size of this building. So that's one big piece of paper, right? That's one big piece of paper. A 10 nanometers is about that big, about a quarter inch.
Kevin Hilgers:
Right now we're making devices nanometers in size, okay, and so we've become, we've renamed ourselves as the Nanofab Okay, so we do nanofabrication. Now, the reason you do that, the reason you want to make things small is, is this phone, this iPhone, right here it has, you know, when I was a kid, I had a transistor radio in the 60s, and I could pop open the back, and I could see it printed on the front. It said six transistor radio. That was a big deal, you know, six transistors, and I could pop open the back, and I could see those transistors in what they call 2-cam. Is so I could count them, you know, and actually see the transistors. So I had a device that was about, you know, held in my hand, had six transistors, and that was state of the art back in the 60s. Now we've got an iPhone. You've have an iPhone there. It's got like, 15 billion transistors in it, 15 billion transistors, the new Apple. What is the Apple making VM three trip chip. It has like 25 billion transistors. And when you hear the word transistor, all that is is a switch. It just turns things on and off, and since it goes from on to off, that's the two states. It's a binary switch. Okay? It's digital. That's where you hear the term digital come from, right?
To hear more from Connor and Kevin please tune in to State Press Play.
Conner Greenwall:
Arizona State University has found itself near the top of the semiconductor world. Over the last 40 years, ASU has taken advantage of the local semiconductor industry and has grown alongside it.
But how did the semiconductor industry find itself in Arizona? Next episode, we’ll dive deeper into how ASU got the new lab as well as how Arizona is becoming a powerhouse in the semiconductor industry, and the path that took us here.
I’m Connor Greenwall, and that’s all for this week’s State Press Play. State Press Play is produced by our podcast desk editor, Kylie Saba. Our original music is by Ellie Willard and Jake LaRoux. Special thanks to our managing team, Morgan Kubasko and Matthew Marengo.
