Trumpf Plans €70M EUV Facility in Ditzingen

Trumpf GmbH & Co. KG plans to invest €70 million in the expansion of its headquarters to include extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) microchip production technology.

New buildings covering an area of almost 366,000 square feet will be built in the next two years. A multistory hall will include not only production areas and cleanrooms but also zones for testing and startup. Space for 270 workers is planned for an adjacent office block.

An architect's rendering of the new EUV facility, with the office complex in the foreground. Courtesy of Barkow Leibinger.

"We're developing and producing unique and highly complex laser systems here, and this is creating high-tech jobs in Germany," said Trumpf President Nicola Leibinger-Kammüller.

The project is being planned by the architectural firm Barkow Leibinger. 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 subsidiary Trumpf Lasersystems for Semiconductor Manufacturing GmbH. Founded in late 2014, it exclusively handles production and development of laser amplifiers and related components.

For these amplification systems, four high-power lasers are connected in series in order to generate extremely powerful pulses. These pulses then hit tin droplets inside a vacuum, generating very-short-wavelength EUV light. This enables the creation of 10-nm structures on microchips. The technology will make it possible in the future for more than 10 billion transistors to fit on a single microchip, which would make smartphones and other electronic devices far more powerful than they are today.

For more information, visit www.trumpf.com.