ON Donates $5 Mil In Equipment To ISU
One local company has made a big donation to help educate future engineers. ON Semiconductor has given Idaho State University’s new research facility $5 million in equipment for nuclear testing.
Crews pulled out each piece of machinery donated by ON from a full-size moving truck on Friday, and rolled them into the Ballard Building.
It is the first equipment being moved into ISU’s new home for engineering research, and associate professor Eric Burgett said this means big things for his work.
“So this gives us the ability to bring in accelerators, reactors and material science all in one place. So we can now do nano technology, we can look at materials effects. This amount of space allows us to put accelerators, reactors and materials all in one place. We didn’t have that ability before,” Burgett said.
ON was able to make the donation because the equipment is out-dated for the company. But Burgett said it can still be a valuable teaching tool to replicate what students will see in the real world.
“That’s what we’re good at in academia. We can bring things back to life and still find excellent uses for this kind of equipment,” he said.
Not all the equipment moving in was donated — Burgett purchased a new electron microscope worth $1 million.
As the equipment kept rolling in, Burgett showed off one of the research rooms where he and his team will be working. It is the the first clean room where ISU will be doing research. The team will be growing crystals for radiation testing. To do that, Burgett will need to hire 30 to 40 new research assistants.
That kind of growth is a part of his vision for the university to become a preeminent force in engineering.
“Coming from Georgia Tech I want to kind of make this the MIT of the west, since I came from the MIT of the south,” Burgett said. He may have been kidding around, but his tenacity for the goal is very real.
ON site manager John Spicer said he is happy to see the company relationship with ISU grow, and hopes to be able to train his current employees there, as well as hire more ISU graduates.
