The smell of fresh paint hung in the air as Marc McGee took a stroll recently through the new 38,700-square-foot multi-tenant building in the Thad Cochran Research, Technology and Economic Development Park.
Construction workers, painters and electricians hustled about, the buzz of power tools echoed down the corridors, and in a second-floor hallway, project superintendent Shawn Forrester, of Columbus-based West Brothers Construction, looked over plans for the three-story building off Highway 182.
“As much as I”ve harassed you over the last year and a half, it”s really starting to look good,” McGee said to Forrester as the two shared a laugh.
Construction on the $9.3 million project began in June 2009. Tenants are scheduled to move in Dec. 1, McGee said.
The building marks only the latest chapter in the park”s ongoing success story. Practically hidden along Highway 182, removed from Mississippi State”s, main campus, the cluster of high-tech buildings in the park are becoming a cornerstone to attracting tech companies, both inside the park and throughout the Golden Triangle. Several technology companies are expanding in the park, adding to the 1,500 jobs centered at the various buildings on the 272-acre campus.
Park expansion
The Mississippi State University Research and Technology Corp., a not-for-profit company organized in 1998, is spearheading construction of the energy efficient multi-tenant building with the Oktibbeha County Economic Development Authority and the U.S. Department of Commerce, and will occupy a portion of the first floor. McGee serves as director of the research park and Research and Technology Corp.
Mississippi State”s Office of Technology Commercialization and Entrepreneurship Center also will occupy the first floor.
On the second floor, Spatial Information Solutions and nCode will occupy a majority of the space, while approximately 3,100-square-feet remains available, McGee said. Camgian Microsystems plans to expand and occupy the entire third floor.
“What we”re trying to do is provide a one-stop shop for entrepreneurship and research,” McGee said. “We”re also bringing some much-needed office space and jobs to the area.”
For Camgian, the expansion is necessary. The Starkville-based electronic systems and semiconductor company has been awarded a handful of new projects this year and plans to expand its workforce, although the number of new jobs coming to the area is yet to be determined, Camgian office manager Ann Johnson said.
Camgian will move across the Thad Cochran research park from its current 7,100-square-foot facility to a new 12,000-square-foot space in the multi-tenant building. The expansion will provide Camgian staff with more than twice the amount of lab space as their present location, Johnson said.
“We are very excited about the opportunity to expand and grow,” Johnson said. “At Camgian, we”ve been working very hard and won several programs this year, so we fully expect to add a substantial number of jobs and continue to grow in the commercial sector and with government research and development.”
In September, Camgian announced it was awarded a Small Business Innovation Research Phase 2 project by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The project will allow Camgian employees to develop an ultra-low power “system-on-a-chip” technology that will enable significant improvements in size and endurance over current generation low-power Microsystems, such as unattended ground sensors, micro unmanned aerial vehicles, micro satellites and body-worn electronics. This is achieved through the integration of advanced energy-efficient circuit designs that enable the power consumption of the chip to be dynamically matched with the performance needs of the system.
In April, Camgian was awarded a Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency”s Information Processing Techniques Office. Camgian is teaming with BAE Systems Advanced Information Technologies to develop a multi-tiered intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance network architecture comprising both small unmanned aerial vehicles and long-endurance unattended ground sensors. The ground sensors provide persistent detection, classification and tracking of ground targets over large areas of interest.
Also in April, Camgian announced it was awarded a Small Business Innovation Research Phase 1 Project by the Air Force Research Laboratory. The program focuses on developing an ultra low-power system-on-a-chip technology which will enable improvements in size and endurance over current generation wireless micro-sensor networks.
“We have a lot going on out here,” Johnson said.
SemiSouth
Camgian isn”t the only company expanding within the park. Around the bend, SemiSouth Laboratories co-founder Jeff Casady sat in his office this week at the Silicon-Carbide chip manufacturing facility in the Powe Innovative Technology Center and talked about the company”s future.
With the pending infusion of $30 million from a California-based clean technology company, Power Integrations, SemiSouth plans to expand its workforce from 74 employees to approximately 150 over the next 18 months, Casady said. Approximately $3 million to $5 million in new equipment also will be installed over the next six to 12 months to meet production demands.
The chips are an energy-efficient, low-cost technology used in solar panels, automobiles and other products, and SemiSouth is one of only three Silicon-Carbide chip manufacturers in the world, Casady said.
“We have to rapidly increase the volume of production to keep up with the demand,” Casady said. “This is a technology that is being used more and more often.”
SemiSouth has come a long way since Casady and fellow Mississippi State University professor Mike Mazzola founded the company in 2000 with only a handful of part-time employees. By 2006, SemiSouth employed 20 to 25 people, and by the beginning of 2010 the company had roughly 50 employees, Casady said. More than 20 new employees have been hired so far this year, he said.
SemiSouth shares the Powe Innovative Technology Center in the research park with II-VI Inc., a company which specializes in engineered materials and components, but II-VI Inc. plans to move to another location and free up space in the Powe building for the expansion of SemiSouth.
“It”s something you hope for, but don”t really have a lot of time to think about,” Casady said of SemiSouth”s expansion in recent years.
Technology corridor
SemiSouth is part of a research and technology corridor which stretches from Alabama to Columbus and Starkville. While Silicon Valley in California grew in part because of research at Stanford University and the University of California-Berkeley, Casady sees a similar trend happening around Mississippi State, where degrees and Ph.D.s abound.
“We expect and believe that a lot of high-tech companies should be coming out of Starkville,” Casady said.
Among other tenants in the 272-acre research park are Mississippi State University”s Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems, High Performance Computing Collaboratory, Institute for Clean Energy Technology, the Social Science Research Center, the Center for Computational Sciences, the GeoResources Institute, SimCenter, Sitel and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Approximately 1,500 people work in the park.
Plans are in the works to construct another facility on a hill across the parking lot from the new multi-tenant building and install a new four-lane entrance off Highway 182. The park currently has only one entrance, located across Highway 182 from the Mississippi State campus.
A movement also is gaining momentum to designate one or two lanes on four-lane Research Boulevard, which forms a one-mile loop around the research park, for pedestrian and/or bicycle traffic only.
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