“That is very meaningful in terms of giving us greater flexibility to research and develop more memory technologies, so we can bring them faster to high-volume production at our building sites and bring those solutions faster to the benefit of consumers and businesses worldwide,” said CEO Sanjay Mehrotra at the opening ceremony

“There is massive opportunity in front of Micron to really grow into the memory-system business, to get more and more cost-effective, to improve our technology positions in some places where they’re trailing, and to take advantage of some places where we have the technology advantages,” added Mehrotra.

The R&D center will focus on technology and products that Micron plans to bring to the market in the next five to 10 years.

Micron develops its processes at Boise before transferring them to its 12 production fabs around the world.

Micron has just transferred its 1xxnm process to Its Hiroshima fab and its 64-layer NAND process to its Singapore fab.

R&D is getting more important to Micron as its products become more specialised,

“In mobile applications, phones have much more intelligence behind them,” says technology development evp Scott DeBoer, “the chips are combined in unique packaging. They have special functions. It wasn’t as important back when we were a commodity memory supplier. It’s much more important now that we’re selling solid-state drives and we’re a key supplier for some of the biggest mobile device makers. It’s very much of growing importance and a focus of our team.”

Micron has also announced plans to build a three-story 225,000 sq ft office building on its campus and is adding 12,000 sq ft to its 33,210-sq ft cafeteria.