Construction work on the Jenoptik group’s new high-tech fab at Dresden Airport Park began September 6, 2022, with a groundbreaking ceremony attended by Saxony’s Minister-President Michael Kretschmer and Mayor Stephan Kühn, Dresden’s Councillor for Urban Development, Construction, Transport and Real Estate. The two politicians ceremonially broke ground together with Jenoptik executive board members Stefan Traeger and Hans-Dieter Schumacher and other representatives of the photonics group. In the afternoon, the company invites its sixty employees at the site together with their families to a summer party on the construction site.

“Dresden will become a main location for our micro-optics activities. We deliberately chose one of the most important locations for the semiconductor industry in Germany and Europe, where many global companies and research institutions of the industry are present,”said Stefan Traeger, president and CEO of Jenoptik AG.

Jenoptik is investing more than 70 million euros in the new high-tech fab with a total of 11,000 square meters of net floor space, including 2,000 square meters for clean room production. Production is scheduled to start at the beginning of 2025. The new high-tech fab will manufacture micro-optics and sensors, which are mainly used in semiconductor lithography systems. Production will take place in clean room classes ISO 5 and 3, which also meet the highest requirements for vibration-free production and temperature stability. Comprehensive vibration monitoring is also in place during the construction of the fab in order to not disrupt the production processes of neighboring companies in the industrial park.

Jenoptik has been active in Dresden since 2007 and currently has more than sixty employees on site. With the new production facility, Jenoptik will concentrate manufacturing in Dresden, which is currently spread across several smaller external locations. The photonics group is creating sixty additional high-quality jobs and increasing its local workforce to a total of well over 120 employees. In addition to Dresden, Jenoptik also manufactures its high-precision and micro-optics at the Thuringian sites Jena and Triptis (polymer optics), in Heerbrugg, Switzerland, as well as in Jupiter (Florida) and Huntsville (Alabama), USA. In the Advanced Photonic Solutions division, around 2,300 employees work on photonic technologies for the success of future industries.

With the new fab, Jenoptik is meeting the rapidly growing demand for photonic solutions. Industry experts predict further growth for the semiconductor equipment industry – the main customer of the new fab’s products – in the next years.