Semiconductor History | 1830 Willow Creek Circle, Eugene, 1998 — Hyundai's Only American Fab

Hyundai Electronics bought two hundred acres in west Eugene in 1995 and spent about a quarter of a billion dollars on the land and the building shell before a single wafer moved. The finished plant opened in 1998. A trade account of the property puts the full cost of building and equipping it at around 1.5 billion dollars, across 1.2 million square feet. It was the company's only wafer fab in the United States. Eugene did not agree about it beforehand. Unions raised wages and conditions, environmental campaigners raised air and water quality, and others questioned the tax breaks and the rezoning the project was granted. A local retrospective years later credited those campaigns with producing monitoring rules the city still uses. Both halves of that belong in the record: the plant was built, and the opposition changed how the city watches industry. The fab became one of Lane County's largest private employers. One local report put its property tax bill for 2007 at 4.6 million dollars. By then it had changed names without moving. Hyundai Electronics became Hynix in 2001, and the sign on a building in Oregon changed because of a decision taken in Icheon. Eugene was also the odd entry on the list in April 2002 — the one non-Korean fab among the six that Micron would have taken, had the Hynix board not voted the sale down. It closed in 2008. Accounts of the scale differ: contemporary reports say more than 1,100 jobs went, a later trade account says 1,400, and either way it sits among Oregon's largest mass layoffs. The building did not come down. It has been sold repeatedly since at prices far below what it cost, and a 2020 trade report recorded a sale at 6.3 million dollars for a plant built for something near 1.5 billion. Today the site trades under the name Eugene Technology Center, its clean rooms, substations and water discharge capacity listed as assets for whoever comes next. The photograph is a Hyundai four-megabit DRAM, the package carrying the company's H mark and the word KOREA. That is the point, in its way: Eugene was the exception in a manufacturing base that was otherwise Korean, and it is the part that did not survive. Photo: Raimond Spekking, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons