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On Thursday, Sejong Georgia held a ribbon cutting for the opening of their new Integrated Charging Control Unit (ICCU) manufacturing plant.

The ICCUs were developed by Hyundai Motor Group and are currently being manufactured at the plant on West Lukken Industrial Drive in LaGrange. The device is part of the battery for electric vehicles. It controls charging, onboard charging and converting to DC so that car batteries can be charged at home and used to charge the secondary battery in cars that power things like laptops and cellphones.

“The parts are primarily for KIA in West Point and Hyundai in Savannah,” said James Wong, Vice President of Sejong, Georgia.

“For Kia, we are supplying the ICCU for the EV9 and EV6. For Hyundai, the plant in  Savannah, we are providing them for IONIQ 6 and IONIQ 9,” Wong said.

This isn’t Sejong’s first foray into LaGrange. The company has several other manufacturing plants, in LaGrange’s industrial park, supplying parts for KIA and others. The company’s expansion into electric vehicle parts had them take over the former Kaydon Plant. Sejong moved into the new plant in June of last year, Wong said.

“We purchased this building last year, and we demoed it and removed everything from the walls and the floor. We had to install very specific equipment for the ICCU because the ICCU handles many kinds of electric parts, like the PCB,” Wong said.

To produce the parts, the plant is highly controlled from dust and static, which could produce problems with sensitive electronics.

“We installed ESD, the electrostatic discharging, like deionizing. We have to sustain constant temperature and humidity,” Wong said. “It’s like a clean room.”

For the ribbon cutting, visitors were allowed to tour the manufacturing plant but not before donning clothing to protect the plant from outside contaminants and experiencing the ESD firsthand.