HP Inc. has landed up to $50 million in federal CHIPS Act money to modernize its campus in Corvallis, aiming to more tightly integrate its research and manufacturing on the site.

The company said it expects to add 100 factory jobs in Corvallis and expects the project will temporarily employ 150 construction workers. HP indicated the project might eventually make way for a larger production line in Corvallis down the line.

The federal dollars will fund manufacturing of microfluidics technology, manipulating fluids at a microscopic scale. HP is hoping to adapt technology it developed for the inkjet printer, which it invented in Corvallis 40 years ago, to other fields including pharmaceuticals and cellular research.

“We’re into drug dispensing. We’re into single-cell drug interaction for research (into) cancer. We’re into 3D printing and other future things that we won’t talk about today,” HP Vice President Tuan Tran told attendees at Tuesday’s formal announcement in Corvallis. “I expect over the next 12 to 14 months we’ll start getting our facility up to speed.”

Corvallis was once among HP’s biggest sites, with 10,000 employees and contractors working on the campus during the 1990s. Three-quarters of those jobs evaporated in subsequent years as the printer industry faltered and HP shifted more manufacturing overseas.

Two years ago, HP outlined plans to bring some of those lost jobs back to Oregon if it could win a share of the $52 billion in CHIPS Act funding Congress allocated for the domestic semiconductor industry. That’s the money the U.S. Department of Commerce awarded to HP on Monday.

“The potential of microfluidics for the life sciences is enormous, and they’re really harnessing it to do great things,” said Undersecretary of Commerce Laurie E. Locascio, a biology researcher who had been working in microfluidics since the 1990s before joining the Biden administration.

HP said it wants to build a “lab-to-fab” model in Corvallis, where lab research moves quickly to the factory floor. The semiconductor industry refers to its factories as “fabs,” short for “wafer fabrication.”

“The ability to think up things and try them out — having the workforce here, the talent to do it — is really a hallmark of what Oregon does,” Gov. Tina Kotek said at Tuesday’s event. “We have great minds here, we know how to make things; we know how to put those two things together.

HP’s Corvallis campus is the third Oregon site to win CHIPS Act funding. Microchip Technology secured $72 million in January, and in March the Commerce Department awarded $8.5 billion for Intel to build or expand factories in Ohio, Arizona and Oregon.

HP is also receiving $9.5 million from the Oregon CHIPS Fund to fund its microfluidics work in Corvallis. Oregon has aggressively courted federal support for the state’s semiconductor companies. In addition to Kotek, officials at Tuesday’s announcement included both of Oregon’s U.S. senators and two members of the House of Representative.

The government funding comes amid a cyclical downturn in the semiconductor industry. Microchip has furloughed its Oregon factory workers intermittently this year in response to flagging sales. And Intel is in the process of cutting 15,000 jobs around the world as it responds to stagnant demand and growing competition from rivals. HP is still working to demonstrate there is a large market for its microfluidics technology in life sciences and other fields beyond printing.

In the same way printers deposit tiny drops of ink in precise spots on the page, HP hopes microfluidics could enable individualized medical procedures and a new class of pharmaceuticals.

“The CHIPS grant is focused on where we go in the future,” Tran said. He said HP is making an unspecified investment in its Corvallis manufacturing, “much bigger” than the $50 million federal grant to expand production capacity.

If HP succeeds in developing markets for its products, Tran said microfluidics could someday be a multibillion-dollar business. And if that happens, he said HP will need more production capacity.

The company would consider labor costs, local worker skills and other factors in considering where to site that additional manufacturing, according to Tran. But he said that it would be most convenient to keep the production in Corvallis, close to the labs.

“Everything else being equal, you want it to be here,” he said.