What is Integra Technologies? CEO shares plans for $1.8B Wichita facility

WICHITA, Kan. (KWCH) - A Wichita company plans to expand with a $1.8 billion capital investment that would bring nearly 2,000 new jobs to the area. It’s said to be Kansas’ second largest economic development project, just behind the Panasonic plant coming to the Kansas City area.

Friday, 12 News sat down with the CEO of Integra Technologies to explain what the company already does for northeast Wichita as it looks ahead toward expansion. The 40-year-old company’s plans are contingent on receiving federal “CHIPS for America” funding.

Integra Technologies has successfully operated under the radar in Wichita for decades, as its CEO says, the company doesn’t have a local customer base. Integra Technologies’ home is across the street from the east Wichita Sam’s Club, off Rock Road between 29th Street and 37th Street.

“Why don’t people of Wichita know who Integra is? We don’t really have a customer base here. We started out as part of an NCR test lab,” Integra Technologies CEO Brett Robinson.

What the company has built over the last few decades in Wichita is becoming “really incredibly good at making semiconductor chips,” Robinson said.

Robinson explained the process for making vital technology come to life.

“We take the wafers (thin slices of semiconductor) and will dice them up into little pieces. And then we’ll take each of the individual dies (small blocks of semiconducting material), which is the brains of the part, put them inside of a package and solder out the leads that you see on a printed circuit board, “Robinson said. “Then we will do test and qualification of those devices to make sure they’re good.”

Robinson said Integra is the largest US provide OSAT (Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test) back-end services.

“Today, only 3% of the OSAT services are provided in the country. China and Taiwan have about 50% of the capacity,” Robinson said. “What the new facility is primarily focused on is bringing back the high-volume manufacturing. So, we will be running billions of units a year through the new factory instead of millions of units a year that we run today.”

The leader of the employee-owned company said is 250 employees in Wichita and 250 others in Silicon Valley are excited about a new, 1-million-square-foot headquarters and production facility with high-tech machinery.”

“Wichita has got a lot of manufacturing expertise, as you know. We plug into that very nicely,” Robinson said. “Yes, we are high-tech, working on very delicate, tiny pieces of high-tech components, but it maps over very well. The workforce here is phenomenal.”

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