A multi-story hall will include not only production areas and clean rooms but also zones for testing and start-up. Space for 270 jobs is planned for an adjacent office block.
“We’re developing and producing unique and highly complex laser systems here, and this is creating high-tech jobs in Germany,” said Trumpf President Dr. Nicola Leibinger-Kammüller. The project is being planned by the architectural practice Barkow Leibinger, and the investment sum includes the costs of construction as well as setup of the elaborate building automation required by EUV technology.
The new buildings will be used primarily by company’s subsidiary Trumpf Lasersystems for Semiconductor Manufacturing. Founded in late 2014, it exclusively handles production and further development of Trumpf laser amplifiers and related components. For these amplification systems, four high-power lasers are connected in series in order to generate extremely powerful laser pulses. These pulses then hit tin droplets inside a vacuum, generating very short-wavelength EUV light. As part of a special exposure process, this enables the creation of tiny structures on microchips; less than 10 nanometers in size, they are even smaller than a flu virus. This means that in the future, over ten billion transistors will fit on to just one single microchip – making smartphones etc. far more powerful than they are today.
_{(Source: Trumpf GmbH)}