Excelitas Technologies, a global technology leader delivering customised photonic solutions, has announced that its Qioptiq subsidiary held a ground-breaking ceremony last week to mark the beginning of construction for a new factory in Göttingen, Germany.
Qioptiq will invest about €25 million ($27 million) in this expansion of its production capacities. Located in the Göttingen Science Park industrial estate, the new site has an initial acreage of approximately 18,000 sqm (193,750 sqft). The facility will house state-of-the-art ISO 5 cleanrooms and production-related offices, as well as the necessary logistics infrastructure.
The building will have a usable area of approximately 6,700 sqm (72,000 sqft), including an approximately 1,500 sqm (16,000 sqft) cleanroom area. It is scheduled to be operational in July 2021, housing a staff of approximately 100 personnel.
With the inclusion of these new facilities, Qioptiq Göttingen will have cleanroom capacities of around 2,600 sqm (28,000 sqft) for the assembly of complex optical systems as well as for coating and other optical production processes. The company had previously made substantial investments in new cleanrooms at its Göttingen Königsallee headquarters in 2012, 2015 and 2017. Once the new production building is completed, the overall production area (production including cleanrooms, laboratories, and storage) will span over 8,000 sqm (86,000 sqft).
At the ground-breaking ceremony on May 18, 2020, Dr Robert Vollmers, Excelitas VP of Operations, Optics and Managing Director at Qioptiq, said: “The innovative and trailblazing projects we are working on with our customers in the semiconductor industry require maximum cleanliness standards throughout the entire production process. Expanding our cleanroom capacities is an important step into the future for us, as orders and business prospects continue to develop positively – even in these difficult times.”
